Illustration Videos for the Stephen Spender Trust
The Stephen Spender Trust is a charity that celebrates creative multilingualism, including a poetry translation prize for schools. Because of the Coronavirus lockdown, they had to think about new ways to do outreach, and so they asked me illustrate eight poems in eight different languages – on video!
You can see the results here http://www.multilingualcreativity.org.uk/picturing-poetry.
This was a new challenge for me. The hardest bits were getting the lighting right and the first few seconds of each video, where I was sure to mess something up, requiring yet another take! But the finished videos are really exciting, especially the colouring in – I like watching them really fast, so that I appear to be unnaturally assured in my brushstrokes.
Here are some snippets:
In the real videos, you can hear speakers (sometimes the poets themselves) reading the poems in their original languages, from Polish to Punjabi. The poems cover a great range of subjects and tones: childhood memories, musical dragons, and nightime visitations from Death!
Here are some of the finished pictures:
Illustrating the Dictionary
I’m doing weekly illustrations of the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day, which appear on the Oxford dictionaries website: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ and on twitter: https://twitter.com/OED. I’ll also post them on the Dictionary page of this website.
