Reflection speech – English assignment Term 2 We were given the assignment to create a picture book this term for English. The first thing that came to my mind was how in the world am I going to this. I started to panic because I cannot draw whatsoever, finding ideas and sticking to them would be really hard, finding materials, writing the text and creating the actual picture book all under 4 weeks, I thought no way am I going to be able to do this. I did find this assignment very challenging but not as hard as I thought it would be. I learnt a lot from this assignment and lots of skills and information that I will be able to use for upcoming assignments, presentations and in general for the future. One of the big things I learnt from this assignment is time management skills. I don’t have very good time management skills and I normally always leave things to the last minute but with such an art and design related assignment like this it takes a lot of time. Especially creating the book, I had a picture in my head of what I wanted it to look like and it turned out almost nothing like what I was expecting.
There’s a lot of trial and error in the making of a picture book as I have learnt and when one thing doesn’t work you have to come up with a different idea or different way to express your original plan. I also learnt about incorporating visual techniques into a picture book which was actually really hard. (explain visual techniques used)Some challenges and difficulties I faced while creating my picture book, include choosing a topic or storyline and sticking to it. I changed the theme and storyline of my picture book about halfway through the assignment and decided to change my whole idea. At the start of this assignment I had about three ideas of what I wanted to do and it was really hard to choose and focus on just one of those main ideas but also keeping it original and unique. Another challenge was doing illustrations. I was stuck on what type of pictures I could draw but also what I could do to make the presentation actually look good. I cannot draw at all but I also wanted to do it by hand since it was really hard to find the exact images that I wanted online.
To fix the problem of me not being artistic at all I kept the illustrations quite simple and most of the images are traced from online. I also used watercolour and sticked to a basic palette of cool colours. These include dark blue, light blue, turquoise, light green, purple and light pink. Another thing that was quite difficult for me was keeping the story short.
I’m used to having to write long stories and being able to pack the text with information and every detail but with this picture book activity I had a limit on how much writing I could put on each page and how long the storyline could be and this was a struggle for me.I got my main inspiration from the things that are going on around me and what I’ve seen but also from an event that I experienced. Due to knowing the experience and being able to relate to the storyline made it much easier to write and contribute to the text. I also see so many injuries happen while dancing and thought it was a common accident for a dancer. Some people don’t think that injuries are a big thing for a dancer or even sportsperson but it can actually change a lot in someone’s life like I have portrayed in my picture book. An injury in the sporting or performance industry can be very detrimental to a career and lots of dancers have to stop dancing after an injury.
My picture book is based on a young girl who is a ballet dancer and she becomes injured preventing her from dancing. She is told that she can dance again after her injury is healed but she will have to retrain her body almost everything she knows about dance, the technique, the flexibility everything. She decides not to give up and to push through and relearn one of her passions right “back at the beginning” which is the tile of my story. I suffered from a similar injury to the character in my story book and that was the main inspiration. That is the main idea of my book, even after all the hard work that you might put into something it may not work but you have to be resilient and be able to bounce back after something bad happens or doesn’t go the way you planned.
Thankyou
