Happy New Year friends!
If you are new to this blog, welcome! If you’ve been here before, welcome back! I’m so glad you stopped by.
Since 2018, this page has been pretty dormant. When schools closed in March of 2020, I relaunched this blog. My hope was to provide kids with an activity that kept them happily amused and fulfilled creatively. I created weekly posts for 4 months until summer break.
With a new picture book on the horizon and other projects to tame, I did not return to my blog in the fall. But that absence of a creative routine made me realize…I kind of need this playful practice back in my life. It made me a better artist (just check the archive!), a better human being (I’ve donated books by our Guest Artists to local schools and charities) and it skyrocketed me out of my comfort zone (it was back to pens, paper and traditional tools versus my familiar digital tablet).
In that spirit, I decided to kick off 2021 with a renewed commitment to this CREATE A CHARACTER blog for the year. I’ll be providing more Activity sheets for families, educators, artists and anyone else interested in joining this creative adventure.
For this commitment to work with my current schedule, I had to tweak a few things…
1) A new Activity sheet will be posted the first Monday of the month (versus every week). I will do my best to make them live every morning by 9am. Results will be posted the last Friday of the month. This change will allow me to flesh designs out more and experiment!
2) “Blobs” will be called “Shapes” from this point forward.
3) I’ll be building my Guest Artist list. It will feature diverse illustrators with published books that inspire students and make an impact. More details to come! If you admire an artist that falls in this category, please let me know!
This CREATE A CHARACTER Activity was created in 2014 for two reasons:
To bring families together and to push creativity.
A personal challenge for me was figuring out who was actually stopping by. Who was benefiting from the activities. If they were even serving their original purpose. So here is a break down of how I see the CREATE A CHARACTER Activity being beneficial to a reader.
If you are an educator, this activity can be a fun learning warm-up for students. Kids can collaborate or design on their own. It will breed idea-sharing confidence.
If you are a parent, this activity can be a playful way to kick off your family’s week! Try it after breakfast on a Monday morning for five minutes (when my kids were young we did this for years). There are no right answers with this activity! That means you’ll be amused by your child’s imagination and surprised at your own!
If you are an artist, this activity will allow you to experiment and grow! Have you ever tried a medium outside of your traditional toolbox? I’ve found this to be the perfect platform to practice just that (here’s what happened when I tried watercolor pencils for the first time).
If you are a writer, this activity can benefit you too! Imagining characters will lead to new stories. I believe you can draw better than you think! But if that feels too foreign to you, use descriptions to capture the characters you envision.
Whatever your background is, I’d love to learn about you in the comments. Let’s build a community that cherishes and celebrates our creative problem solving skills because it is vital (2020 showed us why).
So here we go! Download your CREATE A CHARACTER Activity sheet here. I’ll see you at the end of the month!
