Here’s the fully analogue, organic intelligence task organiser I started using about 25 years ago.
To answer any possible remaining questions: I got the red hippo toast rack at a car boot sale. I would still be using it if the desk in my shoddy rented flat had not collapsed one day due to having no screws in at all, causing injury to my knee and destruction to the hippo. Some English people assumed I was unaware of the actual purpose of a toast rack but you can’t spend your life explaining yourself. – And yes, if your toast rack has more slots you can have one labelled SOON, or whatever.
It’s about art – in particular, YOUR ART. The art that you’re already making, whoever you are.
It’s about noticing it, and about what happens next.
When you notice that something you made – a gesture, a mark, a sound, a sentence – feels alive and important and very much yours… that’s where art begins. Like a dragon that suddenly emerged, ready to… what? To fly? Roar? Curl up around you?
Whatever it is, it’s your adventure.
I wrote this book a few years ago, remembering my childhood which was full of creative projects, and remembering my sister who went at them with wild abandon. She taught me something important with her loud music, her bold painting, her dancing and her wild ideas… that’s what I put in this book.
I illustrated it with techniques that I learned as a child – potato prints, crayon scribbles, paint that runs and paint that splatters… every dragon is an example of another way you can make your mark.
It’s a book you can read by yourself or out loud, enjoy my dragons, get inspired to make your own, use it to kick off a workshop or just a chat about the beginnings of art, and what art does, and what it is for, and what it means to you.
It’s out now! Go get it from your favourite bookshop!
(In the US, it’ll be out a little later from Candlewick books).
No AI was used in the making of this. AI doesn’t know what it means to be you. Make your own art. It’s better.
Michael Rosen wrote a slim, clear, encouraging guide for children to start writing about their emotions, and discover how that can help them to, well, feel right.
In his own words:
I wrote this book because I’ve found writing about my state of mind really helpful and fun at the same time. Sometimes this is because I’ve been troubled – devastated even, as when my son died. Other times I’ve wanted to celebrate and remember great times I’ve had. The help it’s given me comes from seeing myself reflected back at me. This helps me view myself with some degree of detachment, and this enables me to put myself into the company of others, other people who may have experienced this pain or joy too. Togetherness feels better than isolation. I wanted to share these ideas with young people because I know mental health is a big issue for many young people and I hope this book will help them.
Feelings can be a lot.
I was very happy to illustrate it. I’ve worked with Michael Rosen for several a Finding my way of drawing him was enjoyable, and drawing him in all those different moods even more so.
Michael Rosen doing a reading. It’s a good thing to witness, and, he shows us here, a good thing to be doing, too.
There were many opportunities to use my favourite sorts of swirls and blobs to represent thoughts and emotions.
Writing about feelings can start a conversation. It can open up channels into different ways of thinking.
Most of all, I really think it’s a book that will actually be useful in classrooms, and beyond that – the advice is sound, and it reminded me to get back to listening to and writing down my feelings again.
Michael Rosen talks about THINKING in this book as well as FEELING – about perception, and planning, daydreaming, reasoning and remembering… it’s a lovely, methodical explanation of how it all comes together in writing.
Write to Feel Right is published by Harper Collins in their Collins BIG CAT imprint, available to order, and I think that it’s a very good one for parents to use with their children, and really for anyone with children in their life. Feelings can be difficult, but writing is an amazing tool for all of us.
Once a year, I teach a project at uni where illustrations students learn the basics of having a game jam. They start by improvising a board game in groups, and some years we reskin a card game. Then they go on to develop their own games. It’s always great fun.
It’s very easy to take your first steps into making games with your friends. Making them by yourself is harder, simply because you can’t easily try out ideas – and that is the most important part. To make a game, you need to play with it at every stage.
If you’d like an easy project to start, I think one of the best things you can do is reskin an existing game.
Do you have a card game or board game that you really enjoy? Take it and make it yours. You’re allowed! You are not allowed to publish or sell your version, obviously, but you absolutely can make your own version that you play with your friends. I’ve met many people who have memories of such games that their parents made for them when they were kids, personalised little works of art and care and fun that tell their own story.
To reskin a game, first you need to understand that game well enough – you’ve played it, you know how it feels. What is the current there? How is that theme reflected in the gameplay, in the way the game feels? Now change that theme, and see what happens.
Love Letter. A modern classic by Seiji Kanai
A good starting point is Love Letter – a relatively inexpensive card game, if you don’t own a copy you can easily get one. Every card in it represents a character, and every card has a particular effect that reflects the personality and social status of that character. If you spend a bit of time analysing that, you can easily come up with your own versions (and many people have – you can search for official and inofficial versions). – In the original game, the characters are all members of a court, trying to get to the Princess with great urgency. In game design workshops I’ve seen this game reskinned in amazing ways by students. One version was set on a bus, with the characters being passengers trying to get the last free seat. One was set in a cafe, with only one perfect cake being the great price. Others made it all about their friends, or the university staff. Every game felt unique!
After making up our new versions, we went right on inventing and adding new cards – cards that had effects that suited the theme (a busy kitchen? Add cards that make players shout or have to react quickly!) and characters that suited the setting (how about a restaurant critic?)
All you need to do this is a copy of the original game, pens and paper. A pack of card sleeves is a really good idea, too – they make it easy to quickly and roughly create cards that all look the same from the back.
Plastic card protectors with an opaque back – you can get them in different colours and sizes. They are a great tool for making prototypes. Your local boardgame cafe may have some in stock – and you can do some research while you go look for them…
Reskinning a game like that is an excellent exercise to introduce yourself to some of the concepts that you need to consider when making your own game – how rules and theme hang together, and how little changes can make a big difference in how a game feels and plays.
If you’d like to quickly make a board game about anything you like, you could try snaddering.
Snaddering is a technique that my friend and frequent collaborator Kevan Davis and I invented years ago, and used a lot ourselves. It is a chaotic but effective collaborative brainstorming session that results in a playable game after about half an hour. It won’t always be a game that you want to play over and over, but it will be yours, and it will be fun. The main concept is that you start with a branching roll-and-move track, choose a theme and a few starter rules, and then throw lots of ideas at it which are written, doodled, scribbled straight onto the board by everyone at the same time. At some point, it will be ready to play right away, and you can see how your ideas interact and play out between you.
The system allows beginners and experienced players/designers to create and play together – in fact, it tends to work even better when the group is varied in their interests, in age, in every conceivable way because their ideas will interact in surprising ways.
Quite often, in snaddering you may discover new game mechanics that you can take and develop independently – things that have nothing to do with the roll-and-move simplicity you started out with.
In any case, it is an excellent warm-up, and an exercise in creating a playable prototype as a team. It will show you how scrappiness and playfulness are importent assets, and how it’s much better to try out ideas than discuss them at length and try to imagine what they might do.
No one is the boss, if you make up a game together, it is everyone’s game.
If one of you has an idea of what you want the game to be, save that for later. Instead, allow your group to decide what you want to make, together.
Don’t discuss what you might as well try out instead.
Anyone is allowed to say “no” to any interaction without having to explain why – everyone is allowed to stop playing at any point as well.
Be ready to lose parts of the game as well as making up new ones. It’s useful to sometimes imagine all the things you could add to your game, but also always consider what you could remove.
Make things scrappily, fast, make them together in the quickest way you can to try them out. Save the beautiful drawings and all that for when you have tested the game enough and know it works.
Test, and test, and test your game, test every bit of it, test it with other people and watch how they do.
If your game is really not working, look at all the interactions that happen in it and see if any of them are really good – maybe they could be the basis for a new game.
