Working alonside Live Theatre in Newcastle as part of their Live Tales Volunteering program, I spent some time with their workshop team live illustrating during creative sessions.
The idea for this came from a year 2 class as they worked to create a story called 'Viper, the leopard print Cobra from hobbit land.' They had complete freedom of creativity, suggesting whatever came into their heads.. (hence the complete randomness).
He was to be 20ft tall, have leopard prints spots with a cape, tophat and teenage mutant ninja styled mask. Viper was to live in a hobbit land, surrounded by mountains, and trees and he played his favourite sport of football!
At the end of these sessions, the children would go home with a full story book, written by themselves and illustrated with the drawings I created for them. This was a steep learning curve. I learnt about how spontaneous children are with their thoughts and ideas and how quickly their ideas can change. They are amazed by simple things and the lines making up the images didn't have to be perfect
This presented idea was then turned into a 3D virtual reality world where the kids could come back at a later date and play with it. They could play football, try and score it passed their 20ft friend or search the grounds. They loved it! There were some rendered out pictures of the scenes and a 3D printed version of the snake too.
