Friday 11 October 2013

Storylines 2013

On Sunday, 18 August I appeared as a participant in Storylines 2013, specifically in the Comic Zone area. I have a long association with the Storylines festival going back to 1998. Summaries of previous festivals (pdfs) are available on the Storylines website, and here some responses from the schools themselves. 

It was a useful opportunity to promote my book illustration & portfolio work (including my work-in-progress comic pages) and demonstrate live sketching and colouring. I also gave away promotional cards and stickers based on the Rock of Ages characters. The artists attending this year’s festival were asked to create a picture based on one of Margaret Mahy’s stories, to be auctioned off at a later date.

Here’s a scan of my contribution. © Zak Waipara 2013. 


Events of this kind provide an important chance to meet your potential audience, and I enjoy talking with both children and adults about my work and the artistic process. It’s also a valuable opportunity to meet other professionals (storytellers, writers and artists), and likewise share information and artistic knowledge. 


 Comic area (inset), and portfolio pages. © Zak Waipara 2013.

Critically for me, given my current research trajectory, it also provided the impetus to get more work finished! Presenting at the Art & Design postgraduate conference (discussed last post) also required me to complete practical work (and solidify my theoretical principles) to help demonstrate my on-going project. I see these events as an important part of the process. 

I was also recently asked to present at Dominion Rd School’s Book Week (at the end of June). This involved speaking to the whole school about my role as illustrator, graphic designer, animator and storyteller.

Dominion Road School presentation. © Zak Waipara 2013.

In order to engage the children with the illustration aspect of story creation, I was asked to provide a colouring-in page of my artwork for the junior school (I based this on an animated Maui story I had worked on) and an illustration challenge for the senior school. For the older children, I adapted a story I illustrated called Kopuwai the Monster, and formatted the story into a comic page. To provide incentives, I donated some of my illustrated books as 1st and 2nd prizes, and made certificates for the winning students of the comic challenge, which I judged the following week, presenting these prizes and certificates at the school assembly. Lest anyone feel left out, all the 300 children received Otea stickers as well. It was only at the end of the challenge that I realised how well the children had done to illustrate 12 comic panels within a week! 

Finally, I gifted a laminated copy of my 2007 Storylines poster to the school library. The poster itself has an interesting genesis. In about 2004, the Children’s Literature Foundation of NZ (as they were called at the time) were selected to host the IBBY conference for 2007, and needed a poster to commemorate the event and asked for submissions from local illustrators, including myself. I was fortunate enough to be chosen for this endeavour, and had the chance to illustrate the poster to accompany the late Margaret Mahy’s text, though I never had the chance to meet her in person (although she did visit my primary school when I was a child living in Kaiapoi). There’s a complimentary write-up here

Since it was sent out to over 70 member countries, many variants of the poster were created; some countries even adapted it and translated the text into their own language/s. The poster and its accompanying text were often posted online at the time. Such as this Portugese post,and a Spanish post or two and a Chinese blog, and a Russian post. Wayne Mills of CLFNZ very kindly gave me this copy of my design, turned into an Arabic calendar, and told me he had seen a Japanese variant of the poster – which I still would like to see one day.

Arabic Calendar. Photo © Zak Waipara 2013.

The poster also happens to includes my own two characters from the Rock of Ages comic prologue. Even at this stage, the idea of transferring characters and stories across different types of media and formats was a very normal approach for me, and so naturally leads into my current investigation into transmedia.