Telling a story is an ancient way of communication. We make sense of the world and our lives through stories. Each of us carry stories within - either stories we heard, stories we lived, or stories wanting to born from us.

Illustration is a powerful way of telling a story, through its capacity of expressing emotions, and reaching into the heart, but also through its metaphoric use of visual language. In a picture book, or illustrated book, text and image tell a story together, in a delicate interplay with each other. It is an amazing art, and there are amazing illustrators out there creating unbelievable magic.

In this course we will dive in for our own stories, and get in touch with our inner imagery. Through gentle and playful exercises we set out to explore this inner landscape, and bring what we find, onto paper. The process is built of visualisations, creative writing, experiments of finding our own voice, developing visual vocabulary, illustration exercises, taking inspiration from illustrators and picture books, storyboarding, character development, and artist mindset work. We will work both on improving drawing/painting skills, on developing authentic expression, and learn the steps of creating an illustrated story.

By the end of the course we can arrive to a story / a concept of a picture book / a storyboard, and a few illustrations. We will have several sketches, and a number of techniques tried, so we can take it all home with us and continue the work.

This is a wide curriculum, so what fits into a course is very much time dependent. Good to have at least 3 half days, but ideally this is a 4-5 full day course. It can be a course of seasonal units, running through a year.

In this course we get acquainted with how to make art while out and about. Whether we are sitting in a café, going on a journey, or walking a pilgrim route, we are continuously reached by impulses we would like to capture.
Artists are explorers - says Keri Smith, and she is right: artists are anthropologists, and for an anthropologist, everything is interesting, from the spectacular to the seemingly most mundane.

This course is built on 3 main stones:

1: Sketching/illustration techniques easily adaptable on-the-go, but at the same time very playful and experiential. I am an illustrator, I tend to like techniques which are illustrative/exploratory rather than realistic. We will work with ink and watercolour, printmaking, cyanotype, collage, with an emphasis on interaction with our natural or urban environment, searching for ways to incorporate what we collect or find around us.

2: Ways of observation: how can we as artists be present with a heightened sensitivity to notice, to explore, to awe, to step into conversation with our environment? How can we notice the stories that are all around us? Many-many playful and out-of-the-box way of capturing these observations into our sketchbooks.

3: Walking as an art and mindfulness practice. How can walking and art lead us on an inner journey? Gentle exercises to deepen into connection with the place where we are, and journaling about it through words and images.

This curriculum can be tried in a few-hour-long sketch-walk, or during a longer stretch of walking. A nice combination is studio work (learning techniques), and taking walks (observation exercises, inner journey). If you are leading people on a pilgrimage, I can join you and facilitate the artistic process.