Creative play and story building

I have long been fascinated by the way children play, build their own scenes and create stories as they go. I often look at the remnants of my children’s play and imagine scripts for many a story or film. It saddens me to see creative play lessening in the lives of our children with the intoxicating draw of technology sucking our children’s mind into consumption rather than physical interaction with things.

I decided to focus on this with the children from Merton Park Primary school and use toys to develop scenes and mini installations which could then be developed into cartoon strips and comic books.

This is how we began:

We looked at images from Dinovember and discussed the wonderful idea that children’s toys come alive when we are tucked up in our beds.

We brought in toys of our own and created our own scenes imagining the stories that went with them. They were weird, wonderful and full of imagination.

We then made quick sketches of the scenes in our sketch books.

We then discussed how to create an imaginary backdrop to add to the crazy scenes we had created. We looked at the art of the surrealists and da-daists for inspiration.

Hannah Hoch uses collage and Salvador Dali uses the language of dreams to create striking and obscure images. These would help with the perfect backdrop for our stories

We experimented with pastels to create colourful backgrounds….