BSAB Briony Stewart Picture Book Intensive
Sunday, 20th October 2024
‘Quick! Come and see!
BRIONY!
Much like the effervescent title character of her CBCA Book of the Year picture book, Gymnastica Fantastica, Briony Stewart’s energy and passion for what she does is joyful to behold. Understandably, excitement levels were high when a bunch of children’s book-loving creatives gathered for her Picture Book Intensive workshop on Day 2 of Book Links StoryArts Brisbane.
In keeping with the playfulness of Gymnastica Fantastica, a work that epitomises Briony’s exuberant approach to writing and illustrating, Briony began the workshop by discussing ‘The Power of Play’ in picture book creation. She talked about embracing a playful spirit as a means for finding inspiration, and discovering and developing characters and stories. For writers this may mean finding time to play with words and ideas, or playing language and word games to see how far you can stretch language. For illustrators, it could be engaging the creative spirit for problem-solving, experimenting to discover what the characters or ‘look’ of the book will be, or playing with creating models and different set-ups to see how layouts may work.
The first hands-on exercise to spark playfulness was a little illustration warm up called ‘Fill the shape’. If you want to try this one at home, the idea is you ask someone to fill a page with oddly shaped outlines for you, and then you get to play with filling them in as much as possible. Here are some before and after examples Briony prepared earlier:
Once our imaginations were limbered up, it was time to get playful with language. Perhaps to bridge the gap between images and text, our next exercise was to pick a one word object and describe it in as many ways as possible. How many creative ways can you think of to describe a paperclip? I got eight.
Briony tackled rhyming and cadence as the two next hot topics. I wrote MANY notes on these however possibly the most important takeaway for me was this (paraphrasing Briony here): If you are concerned about whether you’ve used interesting language, you’re speaking like Yoda to make the rhyme fit, your rhythm is perfect, you’ve bended the rhyming rules, or your story is full of filler, try writing the story in prose. And to quote Briony directly:
‘Remember, if it’s a good story, it’s a good story whether it rhymes or not!’
Three other quick tips I jotted down were:
- Watch Peter Jackson’s doco with The Beatles (The Beatles: Get Back). As Paul McCartney demonstrates: don’t lose the flow, put in some made up words that keep the rhythm.
- Look for patterns while you’re writing.
- If you want to improve meter, rhyme and cadence, read lots of poetry.
Our final language exercises for the day were to:
- put our own spin on a nursery rhyme (think re-writing the words to Three Blind Mice or Baa Baa Black Sheep), and
- to create a play on words using a common expression to make a quirky story.
Neither as easy as you may think. It was great to hear some of the new creations read out by members of the group, including the humorous nursery rhyme re-imagining titled ‘Three Blind Wives’ by Michael Battle.
Before we broke for lunch (can you believe we fit all that in before lunch?!), Briony requested we spend some of the break outdoors foraging for sticks. And not just for fun! We got to use our bounty as tools for some visual creativity in the afternoon. Experimenting with ink and sticks to create picture book characters was a relaxing way to get some artistic wiggles out at the end of a thoroughly fun, informative, and full day of exploring the Power of Play.
Many thanks to Briony for sharing her wisdom with candour and razzley-dazzley enthusiasm (and for the bonus behind-the-scenes show-and-tell on the creation of those beautiful wriggly rainbows in circles and swirls). And big kudos and gratitude to Book Links and the BSAB team for creating accessible opportunities to learn from experienced, talented, and skilled authors and illustrators. More please!
PS Check out Story Links for insightful reviews of some of Briony’s work here.
Blog post and images by Melissa Elk
Follow Melissa Elk on Instagram at melissaelkwriter
