This week I have been learning about storytelling from the amazing educators here at the Canadian ADE Academy in Montebello. Lately my creative outlet for storytelling has been drawing, and my plan was to use drawing to share my story. Instead, inspired by the Storytelling sessions at Academy and Tina Zita’s work with Pages, I decided to layer together a rough sketch, an AI generated image, shapes, and text to tell my story.
In Pages, I drew the bookcase using the crayon tool. I wanted the bookcase to have a loose, sketchbook style and I find the crayon is the easiest way to get that look. I kept the drawing black and white so the background wouldn’t compete with the subject of the image.
I really wanted to include a picture of a child in the photo because I wanted to keep the story centred on the child and their thoughts. Since I wanted to share the final product publicly I didn’t want to use a photo of an actual child, so I made the decision to create the image using AI. It took a few edits of my initial prompt to get the look and feel I was going for. To further add to the idea of this image coming from the past, I edited the photo to make it black and white. I also removed the background and added a border to separate the photo from the sketch (Thanks, Tina for that tip!)
To add some colour and interest to the image, I used Shapes to layer the triangle between the photo and the sketch. I returned to the drawing tool to hand letter the text. By keeping the text inside the shape, the viewer can visually connect the statement to the little girl.
My plan is to have this story be part of a larger group of stories reflecting on what literacy instruction looks like in my primary classroom.
How could you stretch your skills to tell stories in a new way?
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