Tag: creativity

Slice of Life: Voice

Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.

I just finished Lisa Congdon’s 30-day challenge “Developing Your Visual Vocabulary: A Daily Practice in Mark Making” on CreativeBug.

She dropped a lot of big wisdom throughout the course.

This wisdom can inform mark making with colored pencils, watercolor, thread, or words on a page: the importance of practice, the acceptance (or even cultivation) of wonkiness (she used the word “wonky” a LOT and it made me love her even more every time), and the development of your own particular VOICE.

Throughout the course, I’ve often copied her lesson and then “riffed” on it by trying it with watercolor instead of colored pencil, or by combining lessons when I didn’t have the energy for a whole-page design.

Last night, I pulled out my watercolors and doodled. It was blobs of color with a stack of brush marks down the center. It was a journal entry of random “thoughts” made with marks rather than words. I knew I could do more with it, but I set it aside, as I often do with the entries in my writer’s notebook.

This morning, in Lisa’s final lesson, she invited us to “go big” on the biggest piece of paper we had using all the marks she had taught us. She modeled how she would set up her paper for an arial-view landscape, and then in time lapse, we watched her fill the whole page, first with watercolor in each section, and then with marks.

I opened my sketchbook to my blobs of watercolor from last night, and suddenly I could see a village in a valley across the road from mountains with wheat fields and high pastures tucked in between. Without looking back at any of the previous lessons, I chose my colors and made my marks.

There are such beautiful echoes between what happens in my writer’s notebook, my sketchbook, and the scraps of cloth where I test different threads and stitches — my “scrappy stitch book.” I’m glad I’ve taken the opportunity to slow down and listen to my own voice.

Twenty Questions

Twenty Questions
by Mac Barnett
illustrated by Christian Robinson
Penguin Random House, 2023
review copy from the public library

While we’re on the subject of questions (see previous post), you need this book in your classroom and/or life.

The text of this book is, indeed, composed of twenty questions. (I counted.) The first is very literal. You can use it to teach the word literal: “How many animals can you see in this picture?” The next question lets the reader know that this will not be a (boring) literal book: “How many animals can you not see in this one, because they’re hiding from the tiger?” It gets more and more creative (inferential, opinion based) from there, one of my favorites being “Which of these children is dreaming of peaches?”

This is a book that will invite conversation and story telling. This is a book that will invite creative question-asking. It might even invite collage-making along with creative question-asking. Let’s get started!