Folktale Week
Thumbnailing and sketchbook planning
I decided to join in with Folktale Week this year, this is an art challenge on Instagram held each November. The hosts provide 7 prompts, some people use these to create a story, others do individual artwork for each prompt. The theme is folktales with some using traditional tales and others creating their own.
I did consider joining last year but felt pretty overwhelmed, this year having already completed a couple of Instagram art challenges I was feeling more confident in my visual storytelling and decided why not have a go. Writing a story is definitely not in my comfort zone, I actually feel really awkward doing it, flashbacks to school perhaps? We must challenge ourselves though and it doesn’t have to be perfect, it certainly isn’t, just doing it is enough.
The prompts this year are night, echo, rain, book, charm, storm, dawn. I think these are a great starting point for a story as it is bookended by night and dawn giving a timeframe in which it can occur. I still felt a little stuck about which folktale I might use (as I did not have any ideas for a completely new story, that’s for another time!) but I had a moment of inspiration when I remembered a book my daughter recently brought home from school for her reading practice. I decided to read up some more on the folktales that was based on and felt it fit well with the prompts.
Once I had the folktale in mind the ideas came tumbling out for images. One day I will draw a character who does not have a yellow raincoat but not just yet.
After drawing these first few ideas I was thinking actually I needed my character to be a little bit older if she’s sneaking out at night so I dropped the pigtails. I also decided that actually I was going to show her grandma somewhere in the story, not her just looking through grandma’s bookcase. I was getting quite stuck on how to interpret charm. There was also some moments of feeling very stuck on naming the character. I had definitely worked out a colour palette though.
I still haven’t finished my final illustration and a lot has changed from these thumbnails but I’ve really enjoyed working through my ideas and putting them together.
I hope you have enjoyed a peek at some of my Folktale Week sketchbook. If you look on Instagram you can see the images as I post them this week, I do intend to put them all on here together as well.
Have you joined Folktale Week this year? I’d love to know how it is going.