When the budget needs to go to the bone… stick figures come into their own.
When my client mentioned a new job involving the supervision of schools, the budget was smaller than usual. So she came up with the novel idea of doing stick figures. Because she was laughing, I thought she was joking.
It worked quite well – even stick-people can convey a concept, emotions, and frustrating situations.
Some appear in the first three pics: the disruption of a schoolday by lots of cars full of officials arriving, with everyone rushing to ‘make nice’; the intrusion into school time with the teachers feeling they have to socialise with the officials while the children do no learning; the distraction during classes by the Visitors.
Other images show the various types of schools found there. Some are humbler than others. All can be well-run.
Since a calm child is much more teachable, Jeanne Welsh’s yoga cards make the learning experience more pleasant and beneficial for the teacher and the class.
Together with Nia Thorpe, Jeanne co-founded ‘Calm Classrooms’, an initiative to calm classrooms by means of yoga. The classroom materials consisted of 35 yoga cards showing various selected positions.
In their own words:
The pace of the world in which today’s children are growing up, is only getting faster. Our aim with the Calm Classrooms cards is to encourage children to slow down from the inside out and provide them with meaningful tools for life!
The 35 desk-based activities that make up the Calm Classrooms card deck can be used as a behavioural resource. The resource is easy to use, and helps to create a calm, learning-friendly environment. Its benefits go well beyond the classroom too! Absolutely anyone can use and benefit from our programme – teachers, children, parents and therapists.
The Calm Classrooms cards are based on experience and research, which has shown that calmer children will develop the capacity to gain greater attentiveness and mental focus as well as manage stress and anxiety levels.
In addition, the activities were specially chosen for their suitability for the typical classroom space, and busy schedules. The cards have been divided into five exciting and accessible topics, enabling the teacher easily to draw on memorable, imaginative, safe and achievable activities with little disruption. The five Calm Classrooms topics are: Move, Focus, Relax, Breathe and Connect.
The Calm Classrooms behavioural resource is a simple way to make children’s lives happier and healthier, increase their capacity to learn effectively, manage their emotions, self-regulate their behaviour, and achieve academic and personal success.
Jeanne Welsh now offers professional development workshops and trainings for educators, students, parents and therapists as well as in-house training and development programme for schools.
Apart from teaching yoga in Bali, Jeanne also offers courses online. See her website here.
These are a few selected images from several that were produced for Poema, working with GIZ, which provides capacity for governments internationally.
They included ‘situational cartoons’ or line drawings, using the Simple Style for the people, and the Fotomelt style for backgrounds. This combination was well received and has become our standby in the years since we first started collaborating on adult education.
2021: A recent update for the main featured image had more social distancing, and can be viewed in the gallery.
The 2020 version of a queue at the tax office
A comic as an intro to a chapter
Comic strip to clarify certain points
The facilitator character, who introduces and ends each animated tutorial
Loose organic lines in a technical drawing. What fun!
Yes, really – every now and again one has something way out of the ordinary to tackle. As the client said, ‘It’s something a little more exciting for the technical drawing portfolio.’
You may already have seen the English poetry post, (also the featured project on News & Views) showing various poems illustrated in different styles.
These are the title pages that announced a new section.
There were six, and each section had a theme. These were brought out by collage to establish different moods. The gray stripe and title from the briefing document formed part of the preview to show the client how it would all fit.
Poetry illustration – when words and pictures dance the good dance
Finding the images to go with a poem can be a very fine line to dance along. Images that come up are personal to everyone who reads the poem. And yet many things about any poem are universal. They tug at common heart-strings; the language is designed to distil a lot of feeling and meaning into very few words. Illustrating poetry is up there as the champagne of illustration, for me at any rate. How can one not feel honoured when asked to embellish someone else’s work of art?
It’s intimidating, but – probably because I love poetry, that quells the fear. It can be very challenging to put into visual form what the poet has already put into a kind of word-image, so vividly are the images evoked, very often.
These are a few selected poems from a recent job for Shuter & Shooter, Pietermaritzburg.
Enjoy the poetry and you are most welcome to weigh in with your thoughts on any poem and/or image.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
FunctionalAlways active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
