Yesterday, we left school for a piratical adventure. Dressed in all our pirate finery, we boarded a bus (but we pretended it was a pirate ship!) and headed to the Hunterian Art Gallery to meet illustrator Kasia Matyjaszek. She illustrated a book called, Molly Rogers Pirate Girl, that we have been using to help us learn about describing characters.

When we arrived, Kasia was there and she was also dressed as a pirate! She had dressed as the main character, Molly Rogers. She read the book to us, while showing us lots of little details in the illustrations she had done. She was really funny and she loved that we were all dressed as pirates.

We learned some interesting things to use when we try illustrations. The most important one was that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t even bother having a rubber because when you make a mistake, you should just keep going. If you do this, you invent your own style and that is a very cool thing, according to Kasia.

We used a sheet of paper as a background, with coloured paper to tear into shapes. Our imaginations helped us to decide what to make, once we’d looked at our paper shapes. We added detail with pens or pencils.

At school, we have already written our own pirate books, with character and setting descriptions inspired from Molly Rogers and another book, The Wild Girl. Next week, we will make front and back covers for our books, with illustrations inspired by Kasia.