In your last blog post, you reflected on your experience working with your co-author, with specific attention to the experiences of inhabiting their perspective and receiving and responding to their feedback. In this post, write a paragraph in which you reflect on the experience of making/working with your partner. What were the different skills you needed in order for the designing and illustrating to go smoothly and productively? What challenges did you face? How did you respond to those challenges?
As always, be sure to point to specific examples in support of your observations. And continue working to incorporate sentence variety into your paragraphs.
One skill that I needed to master was talking to this kid. He was very quiet and I sometimes had trouble getting him to talk to me. This also meant that I had to pay close attention to how he was acting. It went well, but once or twice he wanted to do other things but he wasn't saying anything. Luckily I asked him in time. One of the main challenges was keeping him focused the first day when I was reading the fairytales. He kept looking at other people. I overcame this by pausing when he looked away and waiting for his attention to return. This experience has been great fun.
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ReplyDeleteMy partner and I worked quite well together, though we had very little communication. My partner would let me know what she wanted to do and what she did not. The main challenging thing that I faced with my partner, was she basically changed my whole story. That was the only problem.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed working with my parter; the whole process was extremely smooth. Along the way, we created an unspoken system where I would read him the chapter we were about to draw again and then ask him what he wanted before we started drawing. If he could not visualize anything at that moment, I offered different scenarios that could be put onto the page. Once we were drawing, I started facing my only challenge during the illustrations-- how much independence to give my partner. I was not sure how much I should have drawn on the page, or to just let him do everything. I saw some other people helping their kindergarteners a lot, but I decided to give Graham more independence. All I drew was the sand that our characters were standing on, and the bodies of the people. Graham drew the faces, pants, hair, houses, and all the other details. I am very excited to continue this process and finish my book!
ReplyDeleteI had a lot of fun worker with my kinder-gardener. When in the drawing process, my partner and I discussed what would look best on each page to represent that part of the story. After doing this I would let my partner illustrate the picture we decided to use for the page. There were a few problems when I tried to explain my ideas to my partner. I would often explain where I would something placed but he would not put it there. Or when I wanted the princess to take up the whole page instead of a small part of it my partner would not understand what I meant and would proceed to draw a small drawing of the princess. I attempted to draw an outline of what I wanted him to draw to help show him what I meant, but that did not work. I was unable to resolve this problem, but thankfully it was the only problem I had during the drawing process. My role of the drawing process was mostly coloring and adding small details. Overall, the working process with my partner went pretty smoothly, I had so much fun.
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ReplyDeleteThe communication process between my co-author and I was a bit frustrating at times. Alexis, my partner, was a good artist but solely drew the people in the story and never the background. This was challenging because I didn’t want to force my partner to do anything, but I also wanted the reader to be engaged with the drawings. When only people were drawn, it made the illustrations dull. I suggested that she could include more details by asking her what the person was wearing, what their facial expression was, where they were, and what the characters looked like. After that, she started to include more detail but never drew the background. Overall, the process between the two of us went smoothly but I faced challenges of communication at times.
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ReplyDeleteThe process overall was good and went smoothly. There was only one main thing that was frustrating, one of my co-authors wanted to use only two colors: black and brown. This made the pictures in the beginning very mono-toned. I would occasionally ask "do you want to add a yellow sun" or "what about the blue sky?". After two or three I gave up not wanting to push her or make her do something she did not want to I kept quiet. I then found an opportunity: the bunny. I decided to ask both of my co-authors what color it should be and they did not know. So I gave ideas: blue, purple, pink, orange etc. We finally decided on a rainbow bunny. It added an interesting contrast. Now when you look at the page you first see the rainbow bunny. In the end every thing worked out.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the collaboration process, there were many skills that I had when illustrating with my partner Bruce. On skill that I had to use during the collaboration process was being patient and staying calm. My partner at first had trouble understanding my story, so when we were illustrating the book the characters were not what I thought they were. Another skill that I had to use was being able to adapt to things. Throughout the illustration process, there were a few illustrations that I was not expecting. For example, my samurai being a monster. I had to adapt to this and go with the illustrations. I think that I had a few challenges. The first challenge I had was the plot of the story. My story’s plot is kind of complex, so my partner, Bruce, had trouble understanding it. As a result, I had to slowly explain my story to Bruce. Another challenge that I faced was illustrating the story. When talking to Bruce, he did not known what he wanted to draw in my story. As a result to this, I would give him a general idea of what I was thinking to do. After this, Bruce would usually come up with another idea for the illustration. To deal with this, I would usually just let Bruce do whatever he wanted to do. I feel that this gave the story its organic feel. Finally the last challenged that I faced was time. Today, we had to illustrate 5 pages. To deal with this, Bruce and I would both illustrate together. This was different from earlier collaborations. In earlier collaborations, we would talk over what we wanted to, and one person would illustrate the photo. Overall, I felt that the collaboration process went very well.
ReplyDeleteOne of the skills that I needed was the ability to get my buddy to draw a bit faster and add fewer details. We were drawing rather slowly during this meeting, and we began to be called in by Ms. Bonamy, forcing me to attempt to draw our story faster. Rudy, my buddy, however, decided that we must add the utmost detail in the illustrations. I faced a dilemma: either allow my buddy to slowly draw the story, or I could rush him. I ended up compromising with him. As he drew in some of the details that he wanted, I would ask him what the next page's sketch should be. Our collaboration went pretty well once we came to the compromise.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the collaboration process, there were many skills that were a necessity in order for this process to be easy going and productive. First off, I needed to be very patient with my partner. Occasionally, I would try to flip the page but my partner would stop me and insist that there was still much more to be colored in and/or drawn. Although this was a bit annoying, I had to deal with it. This is where patience came into play. Using patience, I was able to go back to the page and continue coloring the different things such as the sand and the bubbles. Another skill that I needed to use was open mindedness. My partner and I had totally different ideas of what we wanted the main character, Diana, to look like. In the end, we ended up going with my kinder pal's idea of Diana. Although I didn't really like the idea, I didn't complain and I just went along with my partner. Overall, our collaboration went very well. I really enjoyed working with my kinder pal and I learned multiple things in the process.
ReplyDeleteOne of the skills I had to adopt was the ability to steer a conversation one way without making it sound like I was telling Stella that she was wrong. For example, many times I would ask a question and Stella would interpret it differently than I meant it. I then had to build off of her answer to finally ask her the question I meant to ask. This was new for me and slightly challenging. While I did just normally converse with Stella I had to be aware of my language (in terms of vocabulary.) That added another level of difficulty to my newly adopted skill that I stated above. By learning this skill and eventually honing it, I became very efficient in phrasing questions so I could get the desired result. One of the main challenges I faced was the unintentional foreshadowing through illustrations. Because I had already read the story to Stella she knew the plot and what was going to happen next. Because of this, she started anticipating scenes and drawing what was coming next rather than what was actually on the page. This was my biggest challenge because similar to what I said earlier, I had to find a way to steer her politely in the right direction.
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ReplyDeleteyounger than you. My partner Abby was a cheerful and positive person to work with. Asking her questions about what the story meant to her and other things she wanted to know.I felt like I was able to be in control of the conversation the whole time without "pushing" Abby around, it was a fair working environment and I think I also helped make it fun. Working with a Kindergartner really helped me with learning how to be positive and keeping calm with someone not exactly like me. The only issue I had with Abby was having to coax her to tell me what the story we had read was about. Other than that I had a really positive experience reading, coloring, and writing with my partner!
ReplyDeleteLack of attentiveness, distraction and resistance to my ideas were all areas of frustration during the feedback and illustrative processes. My partner would run around, get bored or want to change definitive elements of the story quite commonly. However, this ended up being an important learning experience for me. It is all about collaboration and communication, especially when working with younger individuals. Patience is key and fostering a supportive environment makes everything run as smoothly as possible. I would not have learned such things if it were not for the adversity my pairing and I faced during the process. My partner and I were tenacious and were able to work out any different opinions we may have had. I enjoyed the experience tremendously and hope to maintain contact with our kindergarten class.
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