Tag: Storytelling

Macmillan Prize 2019: student success

Two of our recent graduates have every reason to celebrate:

Seobhan Hope’s book ‘Summer’s Sleep’ has been highly commended and Amy Steele has won 3rd prize for her book ‘The Lunchbox’. In this blog post Seobhan and Amy speak about their books and how it feels to be shortlisted for / awarded this prestigious picture book prize.

Shortlisted: Seobhan Hope 

“Summer’s Sleep’ is the story of Summer, the giant, who can’t go to sleep. I spent my final year falling in love with and researching folk tales from around Scotland, and was particularly taken by the Story of Samhuinn, or Halloween, where tales tell of a summer and winter king, who fight to see who will be next to rule the kingdom each year in Autumn. I reinterpreted the old tale, wanting to create a meaningful story that was going to encapsulate ideas of sustainability and raise awareness around climate change and global warming in a gentle way. In my story, we find a giant called Summer exhausted, not being able to sleep, and not knowing what to do. He personifies the warm season, which can not end because its gotten too warm for winter to come. Included in the story is also a diverse group of little characters who -slightly cluelessly- set out to help the tired giant. The final result is a colorful, hopefully amusing and thought provoking wee book. The process of coming up with the story, creating the characters and assembling the book was so much fun, and I am delighted it came highly commended at the Macmillan Prize Competition!”

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Winner of 3rd prize: Amy Steele

“The Lunchbook is about a banana who lives in the fruit bowl but dreams of making it into the lunchbox. Like all fruit, he wants to be taken to school and eaten up, every bit. But being a banana has its difficulties and Banana ends up lonely in the lunchbox as all his new friends get eaten. As the story goes on, Banana gets more and more forlorn and begins to rot as he struggles with his emotions. The book aims to differ from other books with food characters because these characters WANT to get eaten, which (I hope) makes people laugh.

Being chosen for 3rd place in the Macmillan prize was super exciting and actually, relieving, because I had been so worried about the story all year – the main character essentially dies – so it was a good boost to know that publishers like the idea even though it’s absolutely bonkers! I went down to London for the private view which was really interesting. I enjoyed getting to see all the other entries and chatting to the illustrators – everyone was so talented! Macmillan also asked me to come into their offices and have a chat about my book and my portfolio while I was down, which I did, and it was SO helpful to hear their feedback and encouraging words about my work.”

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At the award ceremony

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Can you guess?

At the beginning of ‘Unspoken’ each first year Illustration student was randomly assigned a painting from the Impressionist room at the National Gallery of Scotland. During a visit they were asked study it carefully and later do more research into the story behind their painting and how it relates to the artist who created it.

Based on this research, students developed a wordless sequential narrative in 4 panels, to be submitted as a high-quality digital prints at the end of the project. It was important to be imaginative with the storytelling and interpretation of any research material and to create many recognisable links to the original painting, for example through brushstrokes and colour choice.

The project also served as a first introduction to Photoshop and explored the merging of traditional mark-making and digital applications. The results are wonderfully painterly and deceiving in that they don’t look that digitally-generated at all!

Our final crit took place in public, right in front of the original artwork, and with an unknown audience of gallery visitors. This would be a good reason to be nervous, even for the most experienced of artists, but our first years managed just fine.

So can you guess which paintings our students were looking at?

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Muriel Spark 100

Muriel Spark 100 – student work exhibited at the National Library of Scotland.

This collaborative project between Edinburgh College of Art first year Illustration and Graphic Design students was inspired by the current exhibition ‘The International Style of Muriel Spark’, which celebrates the life and work of Muriel Spark one hundred years after she was born in Edinburgh.

Small groups of students formed a collective and worked on a series of tasks including creating a collective archive box inspired by Muriel Spark’s personal collections, the development of one character at different stages of their lives, a tunnel book in response to a piece Muriel Spark’s writing and a piece to help promote her work to a new, young audience.

Throughout the collaboration, the collectives were asked to research into the life and times of Muriel Spark, and to create different responses to their findings. The collaborative nature of the project meant that students had to find a common ground and identify common values to work with one another while delegating various tasks amongst the group.

The students attended a series of workshops and crits led by author Vivian French and artists / designers Brigid Collins, Mary Asiedu and Astrid Jaekel, which has influenced the work they have created. We are delighted to see the work displayed in the foyer of the National Library, where it will be on show until 29th May.

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Long Story Short

First year illustration students have recently completed their final project of the year. The title of the project was ‘Long Story Short’ and spanned five weeks, with the students experiencing a different form of storytelling each week and visually communicating their responses to these stories.

Week one involved a fantastic session of Scottish tales told by professional storyteller David Campbell. The tales were vivid and imaginative, evoking rich imagery and providing great source material for creating illustrations. The following week we met with Tom Clelland, who sang us some of his own story songs. These ranged from love stories, to dark tales of murder. We changed things up a bit the next week by visiting The National Museum of Scotland with author Vivian French. The students wrote and illustrated some non-fiction pieces in response to the objects we saw. Next the class was encouraged to look to the people close to them for their fourth story. Each student recorded a conversation with a friend or relative, and made images based upon the dialogue that emerged. Finally we allowed an element of chance into finding our stories. Each student went out to sketch people in public places, taking an open-ended statement as a starting point and allowing the people and places they encountered to build the story.

The students embraced the challenges presented by this project and have all produced lovely and interesting work as a result. Each student took a different approach, and the outcomes were displayed in a small exhibition held at ECA. We invited David, Tom and Vivian back to see the work and chat with the students. It was a great way to round off the project, as well as a very good excuse for tea and biscuits.

 

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