Emily Rodda and Marc McBride
November 10, 2008As part of our November Book Fair, Scholastic Books donated a visit to Murrumbeena P.S. by author Emily Rodda and author and illustrator Marc McBride.
Level 3 and 4 students attended the incursion in the hall while other grades were able to view the presentation in their classrooms on interactive whiteboards via a web conference.
Emily Rodda spoke about her life as an author, what inspires her to write and how she creates characters, settings and story lines for her books.
Marc McBride started with a blank canvas and quickly transformed it into a colorful, flying, fire breathing dragon, the students were in awe.
To the delight of the students, they were able to have personal copies of Emily Rodda and Marc McBride books signed.
Click here to go to Emily Rodda’s official web site.
Click here to find out more about Marc McBride.
Class Reflections
What did you learn about being an author and/or illustrator?
Author
It doesn’t matter what the topic is you can write about anything.
Feel free to use your imagination when writing.
Look out for things in your daily life and turn them into into something else.
Before writing you should think about the characters, how you are going to set the story out, and where the story is going to happen.
Never throw out a piece of wrting it maybe reused in another story or rewritten at a later date.
Use your own personal experiences as ideas for you writing.
Think about what problems are going to happen in your story.
A good author has a good imagination because their books are more interesting.
When you can’t think of an idea for a story, just imagine there is a world in something around you and write a story about it.
Use your imagination when writing, to make good stories.
If you can’t think of an idea use what has happened in the past for ideas, like something wierd, scary, terrible.
It takes a long time to write a book.
If you make a mistake don’t put it in the bin.
Emily Rodda has written over 90 books.
When writing try and keep all of your chapters the same length.
When you are older and you want to be a writer, you don’t just make up stories, you actually have to believe in them.
Exciting things can happen through your whole life, you just have to add magic to them to turn them into a story.
You have to like reading books to be a writer.
You can get inspiration from other stories to write your own stories.
When writing if you get stuc, close your eyes and imagine you are in the story.
Illustrator
When writing a book you write serveral drafts before it goes to the publishing company for editing before it is published.
Use memories of experiences from your child hood to inspire your writing.
Sometimes you can start at the end of the story and work your way to the beginning.
If you make a mistake in art, keep it, put in on the shelf and learn and get inspiration from it.
You dont have to be the best artist, if you enjoy drawing just do it and keep practising.
You can use diiferent tools, your imagination, colors and different techniques to create illustrations.
Use light colors first and add dark colours.
Paint real things and fake things with a real or air brush.
Keep all of your drawings and keep making them the best you can do.
Use the good parts of unwanted illustrations for other illustrations.
The illustrator’s drawings looked real because of the colours.
When you are young If you aren’t a good drawer it doesn’t mean you can’t become an illustrator.
Marc McBride does illustrations for Emily Rodda books.
Make the main objects in the illustration stand out more than the background.
Original illustrations are bigger than what they appear in the book.
Authors send a design brief to the illustrator, the illustrator uses the brief to design the illustrations.
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