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Anyone Can Be An Illustrator

© Suzanne Hill

Your Own Illustrated Book

Wouldn’t it be exciting to create your own illustrated book? The book “Written and Illustrated By. . .” by David Melton details the author’s demonstrated method for creating an illustrated book. Any student of the program can write and illustrate a book. Despite the creator’s objections, using this method developed to capitalize on both left and right brain capabilities, amazing results can be achieved. I personally believe a major aspect of the results is the practical application – the students immediately see the importance their work takes on as they create illustrations and picture their book in front of an audience and in the hands of readers. They gain a respect for their work that cannot be taught in a classroom. They do not want to see typo errors ruin it. They pay close attention to margins, paragraphing, commas, periods. The form of the finished product sends a loud and clear signal to their creative brain to pour forth ideas and to their academic brain to edit and make clean.

Right Brain, Left Brain

We define our world through the processing of information in the two distinct and opposite halves of the brain. Evidence shows that the mode of the left hemisphere is verbal and analytic, while that of the right is nonverbal and global. Left brain processing is foursquare, upright, sensible, direct, true, hard-edged, unfanciful, forceful. Right brain thinking is curvy, flexible, more playful in its unexpected twists and turns, more complex, diagonal, fanciful, musical, mystical. The mode of processing used by the right brain is rapid, complex, whole-pattern, spatial, and perceptual - processing that is not only different from but comparable in complexity to the left brain's verbal, analytic mode.

The right brain is the side that is associated with creative insights and flashes of intuition. People who mainly operate in this mode are thought of as different, weird, off-beat, creative. Confusingly, it can seem that the right brain often loses out in connections or communications between the two hemispheres, preventing maximal performance or inhibiting our “creative” side. The critical/ analytical side seems to dominate the other. How many times do you hear people say, I can’t even draw a stick figure, I wish I wrote more of the poems I feel inside, the creative urge just isn’t there, I used to enjoy playing guitar when I was a kid? The inner critic has taken over their playful side.