(upbeat music)
- Hello, I'm Jiéyì,
I am an artist and I'm a teaching artist and that means
that I get to share some of my art practices with you.
I like to make art a lot of different ways.
Sometimes I dance, sometimes I work with technology,
but one material I really love is paper.
So today we're gonna be exploring paper magic
and storytelling.
We're going to make a book like this,
that has words and pictures,
and it will be folded from a single piece of paper.
But before we get started with that,
we wanna start brainstorming what our story might be.
So what I like to do is take a piece of paper
and divide it into four sections.
And you can start a story a lot of different ways,
but one way that people start stories is
"once upon a time..."
So you might start thinking about
what that "once upon a time..." is.
"Once upon a time..." there was a starfish
who lived to the bottom of the ocean,
or "once upon a time..." there were a big group of friends
that all lived in a treehouse together.
And then the next panel you wanna add on to
what happens next.
What is the event that makes your story a story?
So "one day," maybe I have,
"one day," there was a big storm that came along,
and a bolt of lightning split the treehouse right in half.
And the third panel, you wanna have whatever happens next.
So I'm starting it "and then..."
So "and then..." there was so much chaos,
the treehouse friends didn't know what to do.
Some of them were really angry,
and some of them were really scared.
They were fighting so much,
they didn't know if they could be friends anymore.
And then in the last panel,
you wanna be able to wrap up your whole story.
So what do you say
to have your story come to a conclusion
or come to an ending.
And a lot of times people will end their story
with "the end."
But you could also end it with "to be continued..."
if you have a lot more to say.
So for me, I might do...
"...but eventually the sun came out, the clouds went away.
and the treehouse friends were able to venture out
and clean up all the debris,
and they were able to build a new treehouse community."
And so one way to do this is you can do it all by yourself,
but I really like this as a project
that you can do with your friends or family.
The way that you do it with your friends or family
is you would start by having everyone
have their own piece of paper
and drawing your four boxes,
and everyone would start their first panel,
"so once upon a time..."
or however else you wanna start your story.
And maybe you could put a timer, like three minutes.
And then you would write your story, and draw your story,
and then pass it on to the next person.
So I'm gonna go ahead and start drawing this.
And when you're drawing,
you can use markers or colored pencils,
really anything that you have on you.
So in my first one, I'm gonna begin writing.
"So once upon a time...
there was a big group of friends
that lived in a treehouse together."
And I might begin drawing my treehouse,
and then I would pass it on to the next person.
And the next person would start the story their own way.
So they might think that something else happens.
So they might say,
"And then one day,
an airplane crashed into the top of the treehouse."
Then you could pass it on to the next person,
and they would write the third part,
and the next person write the fourth part.
You can also just pass this back and forth
between two people.
One thing that's pretty cool about doing this this way
is that you'll be able to come up with ideas
that are totally different from what you might have imagined
to begin with.
Now that we have an idea for our story,
we can start building our book!
For your book, you can use any kind of paper,
notebook paper is okay, you could even cut up a paper bag
to get your paper.
What you want is a rectangle piece of paper.
I'm gonna use a piece of paper
that's a little bit bigger than regular notebook paper,
just so that it's a little bit easier for us to see.
So to begin, what you do is you fold your paper in half,
and when you're folding, you can use your hands
but one thing I really like doing is using a marker
to help me with this crease
because when you use the flat part of the marker,
you can get that crease so much tighter
than you can with just your hands.
Next, what you can do is you can take this flap
and fold it right to the end here,
to this crease that you made before.
And flip it over and do the same thing on the other side.
Next, when you unfold it,
you'll see that you have these four sections, right?
That's sort of like a W shape, that's pretty cool.
Now what you wanna do is, you wanna fold it the long way,
the opposite way.
So you're gonna fold against these creases
that you just made
and fold it all the way across.
And if you look at your corners,
you can line up your corners nice and tight,
because you want this to be...
the corners to line up as much as possible.
And then again, you can finish your crease.
Now what we have is a piece of paper with eight sections,
what we want is a hole that goes just down the middle.
And so when I'm making this cut,
I like to be extra certain that I made the right cut.
So what I do is I'll take a pencil,
and I'll draw right here,
down the middle, so I know that my pencil goes
from here to here.
And this is the part that I wanna cut.
I'm gonna go ahead and fold it the opposite way
so that my pencil mark can be seen.
And when you're making your cut here,
you can Use scissors if you have them.
And if you're using scissors,
you would just start cutting right along here to the edge
so that you have a hole in the middle, like this.
The other way to do it is if you are ripping
or tearing the paper,
so you can tear the paper pretty effectively
if you're really careful.
When I'm using the tearing method,
it's extra super-duper important
to make sure that your creases are really tight.
Oops!
I didn't get that corner lined up.
But that's okay I can redo it.
So I know that this right here,
in the middle is the crease that I wanna tear.
Because I'm gonna be using my hands to tear it this time,
I wanna make sure that I go back and forth with my crease,
so I'm gonna crease it again on the other side,
but just in the middle part,
the part where I'm gonna tear.
And once again on the other side, just to be sure,
this sort of helps the paper have a memory
of where it needs to be torn.
So now I have this,
and I'm gonna start right at this crease
and rip it very carefully.
I can even sort of pull the paper away,
and I'm doing it just until we get to that crease.
Now I have my paper like this,
we wanna make our W shape again.
So it looks like this.
With your W shape you want...
You'll see that there are two flaps here, like this,
you can take your flaps and pull them into a plus sign.
It's pretty tricky sometimes
so imagine what we're doing is you're just taking this
you're pulling outwards,
and then you're starting to pull down
until it becomes a plus sign.
Then what you do is you flatten all of it into a book.
So I have my plus sign.
And then this page starts to go in,
this page starts to go in, this page starts to go in
and I have as a book,
I want my creases to be tight again.
So I'm just gonna go over each of these one more time.
So that I have something that is pretty tight, like this.
When I'm thinking about my story in a book form,
I know that I have a cover, and on the cover,
you can draw an image of something
that represents your story. Maybe it's the main character.
And you'll also want to put the name of the author,
which would be you.
In the first spread,
the first page, you can think about what words you wanna put
in your story.
And the images or the illustrations that go along
with the words
that make your story, that add to your story.
In the next spread,
you have your words and your picture again,
and then in the third spread,
you have your words and your picture.
You might notice that in our first story,
we had it in four parts,
but this one, we only have three spreads in here.
So another way to think about this
is the first spread is the beginning,
the second spread is a middle,
and the third spread is the end.
So you can still do a similar story.
But you'll have to think about another way to put it
into this format.
I have a story that I already started working on
and I wanna keep working on this story.
The story is called The Fairweather Friends.
So I started coloring the first page
and in the first page, I wrote out my words,
"The Fairweather Friends all live together
in a big treehouse..."
There's a little bit more to that,
but I'll save that for the end.
And then I have a picture of my treehouse
and some of The Fairweather Friends.
In the next part, I want to start coloring my story.
So I have my words and I have just the pencil outline
of where my images are.
You can use any sort of colors
that you have at home, you can use crayons,
you can use markers, you can use colored pencils,
but my favorite way to color is with watercolor.
So that's what I'm gonna use for my story.
Some people like to spend a really long time coloring
and some people like to color really, really quickly
and both ways are okay.
I'm starting by working on my yellow lightning bolt
and because I already have my lines here,
this is almost as if you are using a coloring page,
just coloring in all those lines that you already made.
(upbeat music)
And this is the final book that I made,
and I would love to be able to share it with you.
So the book is The Fairweather Friends by Jiéyì.
And on the cover I have one of our friends,
just this long neck bird.
On the first page it says,
"The Fairweather Friends all live together
in a big treehouse.
They would sunbathe on the roof and plant flowery gardens.
Things were good and The Fairweather Friends were happy."
In here we can see our treehouse
and some of our friends here, and here, and here.
I guess this is one of those flowery gardens
and look at all those different sections of that treehouse.
And I think that this is a yellow slide that goes down.
On the next page we have,
"But one day a big storm came along, the wind blew and blew,
the wind blew the slide to the ground,
the rain made the garden into a swamp,
and a big bolt of lightning split
the treehouse right in half.
Some of the friends were scared, some were angry,
there was so much chaos,
the friends didn't know if they could be friends anymore."
Look, that's a slide on the ground.
And we had that bolt of lightning
that split that tree in half.
And it looks like there's big storm clouds on top.
And in our last section, "Eventually the sky cleared up,
the wind stopped blowing so hard and the sun came out again.
Things were different after the storm,
there are lots of pieces to pick up, lots of things to fix.
But one by one the friends ventured outside
and together they were able to rebuild, not the same
but still magnificent treehouse community.
The end."
Thank you so much for playing with me, for drawing with me.
I would love to hear your stories
and I hope that you're able to share your stories
with your friends and family.
I'm Jiéyì, and I am an artist that loves paper.
(upbeat music)