I studied illustration in art school. One way that we practiced was by dividing a text into portions that each student illustrated. After a given time – sometimes a very brief amount of time – everyone hung up their artwork, and we read through them like a picture book. It was an engaging, exciting, surprising way to see how different artists approach the same challenge and how different readers interpret the same text.
Left: Mali L., illustrated scene from Shakespeareʼs Macbeth. Right: Scarlett L., illustrated scene from Interstellar Cinderella.Left: Honor M., illustrated scene from Shakespeareʼs Macbeth. Right: Carina Z., illustrated scene from Interstellar Cinderella.Left: Sebastian M., illustrated scene from Ra Pu Zel and the Stinky Tofu. Right: Naiella C., illustrated scene from Ra Pu Zel and the Stinky Tofu.Left: August T., illustrated scene from Ra Pu Zel and the Stinky Tofu. Right: Harper M., illustrated scene from Ra Pu Zel and the Stinky Tofu.
The Illustration Game is a fun and reliable activity for all ages. When we were forced to teach online, my students illustrated Little Red Riding Hood, Dungeons & Dragons adventures, and their own original fairy tales. They worked zealously to finish their artwork before a timer buzzed and it was their turn to share their artwork with the class.
Elementary Collaborations
The Illustration Game is also a favorite for cross-curricular collaboration. I used it to teach our third-graders about Plessy vs. Ferguson and the Underground Railroad by literally divvying up encyclopedia entries for students to illustrate.
For the fairy tale unit, we illustrated Ying Chang Compestine’s Ra Pu Zel and the Stinky Tofu (Rocky Pond Books, 2024) and Deborah Underwood’s Interstellar Cinderella (Chronicle Books, 2015). We shared the results as a slideshow—narrated by students—at our school’s film festival.
High-School Literature Visits
One of our English teachers, Mr. Kohn, asked if I could recommend an art project to help his high-schoolers think more deeply about Beowulf. I visited his classroom to lead two quick rounds of the Illustration Game. Students had four minutes to illustrate the first passage and ten minutes to create the second.
Another English teacher, Ms. O’Driscoll, invited me to lead the same exercise for her high-schoolers’ reading of Macbeth.
I brought a limited palette of art materials to Ms. O’Driscoll’s classes. She gave us specific scenes to analyze, and we assigned lines to each student. Students had seven minutes to create their first drawings and ten minutes to create their second ones.
“An illustrator’s task,” I explained to the high-schoolers, “is to communicate a text’s most important ideas. So, it’s your job to read for understanding and show us what’s most important about the line that you were given to illustrate.”
I read Macbeth when I was in college. I loved it then and I still do now, but even I understood the text better after analyzing it line by line with these students.
Some of these English students said they’d never drawn before, so I gave some crash courses in figure drawing, expressive coloring, composition, and more. Students wanted to learn how to shade and how to invent believable spaces. A student who likes to draw said to me as I left, “Every time you visit our class, I get two steps better as an artist.”
I encourage you to try the Illustration Game with your own students and colleagues. My video instructions are available at ArtSchooloftheFuture.com.
Rama Hughes is an art teacher at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, founder of the Art School of the Future, and a contributing editor for SchoolArts. Rama@RamaHughes.com; Art School of the Future
National Standard
Connecting: Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context.
Art teachers provide a variety of lessons for students to communicate their unique stories and ideas. Young students identify starting-place symbols in various texts before designing their own personalized letter designs; elementary students create a mural based on local food systems after learning about where their food comes from during farmer visits; middle-school students create nine-panel digital collages with symbols representing their likes and interests; and high-school students learn how cellphones and comic books can be powerful tools for visual communication.
