Draw Me a Story

'Draw Me a Story: The Art of Illustration for Children' is on display at the Museum from 23 April to 30 July 2011.

Schools

Pupils from eight Plymouth primary schools visited the exhibition with writer Hannah Silva and staff from our Learning Team as part of the Plymouth Excellence Cluster 'Gifted and Talented' programme. Hannah had some fantastic warm-up activities for the children to use and they also looked around the exhibition. Our Education Assistant made some empty books for the children to use, which by the end of the day were filled with brilliant stories and illustrations. Some objects from around the Museum, and the odd member of staff made it into a few the stories! Photos of the day are now on our Flickr page.

Further and Higher Education

Third Year students from the BA (Hons) Illustration course at the University of Plymouth worked with our Assistant Exhibitions Officer to create a mural of illustrations around our walls of the North Gallery. Amazingly, the students decided to do this work outside of their normal module structure while they were writing their dissertations and developing their final portfolios! Our thanks go to them all. Photos of the mural being painted can be seen on our Flickr page.

Events and activities

'Draw Me a Story: The Art of Illustration for Children' provided massive scope for our event programme in the early summer of 2011. We staged three author and illustrator talks with Helen Dunmore, Rebecca Cobb, Michael Foreman, Phil Moran and Simon James.

Simon, an illustrator whose work was included in the exhibition, also very kindly created a very special version of his 'Baby Brains' illustrations as a competition for our younger visitors. The competition was launched at a special opening event.

We teamed up with Plymouth Central Library to provide fortnightly Rhymetime sessions for babies and toddlers and hosted a pyjama party for youngsters as part of Museums at Night 2011. We also ran some fun holiday workshops.

Finally, we also had a very special guest visit us in June – Elmer the Elephant! We offered two events with Plymouth Central Library, who read some Elmer stories to our lucky visitors, who were visited by Elmer, and then were able to create their own collaged Elmer to take home. Elmer also managed to fit in some time to visit our galleries and also do a little work during his visits. Take a look at the photos on our Flickr page!