‘What happens if you make a mistake?’ one child asks. ‘Well, then the important thing is to pretend, pretend that this is how you intended to draw the picture in the first place and then it will start to make sense!’ Chris replies. He encourages the children to ignore the voices that tell them they are not good artists. ‘Drawing is having a pencil in your hand and making marks on a paper. You must find your style and once you do, you will see that you can draw too’, he reminds them. Sharing his Three Ws method, Chris explains that drawing can help us to express how we feel, what has happened to us in our life and what we dream of or desire. Who? What? Where? helps us to establish the basis of any story that we would like to tell.
Linking the workshop to Seen and Heard’s core aim, which is to encourage children to speak up about their worries and dreams, their lived experiences as well as their fears and hopes, Chris invites them to think about the prompt ‘In Our Hands’. With a pencil in our hands what can we create? With the opportunity to be seen and heard, what do we want to say? The workshop participants practised drawing their hands and then connecting these drawings to characters. Each child’s picture was shown to Chris and as he commented the children were visibly curious about his reaction. They had prepared for this workshop by inventing characters and making a video which was sent to the artist in advance. They were thrilled when Chris reproduced some of their creations and asked questions that helped him to understand the characters better. ‘What happens if someone tells you that they don’t like your drawing?’ asked one of the children. ‘If that person is the writer whose story I am illustrating then I always listen to what they have to say and make changes accordingly. But, sometimes I don’t feel like making changes and so I write my own stories to have complete freedom over what drawings to match with them’, says Chris. While drawing is usually a quiet and soft practice, do not think that it is not an effective way of making noise about the things that we care about. Art is powerful and can be a creative way to protest. ‘If you want to slay dragons, make art’, Chris advocates as he draws yet another hand, thanks the children for their art work, and adds a sweet ‘Good Bye’.

The collaboration with the school Fichtelgebirge Grundschule, Berlin was co-ordinated on behalf of Seen and Heard project by Dr Farriba Schulz (Humboldt University). Special thanks go to Bojka Bogdanovic.

The illustration workshop is part of the creative and participatory process that Chris Riddell and Sita Brahmachari are engaging in to make a children’s book on the right to freedom of expression. The creation of the book is part of the EU funded project, Seen and Heard: Young People’s Voices and Freedom of Expression, and is overseen by Nicky Parker on behalf of Amnesty International Poland.