Make Your Own Picture Book! (A workshop for kids only)

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Do you have a story you’d like to tell? Authors and illustrators all have to start somewhere, and in this workshop, children’s book author/illustrator Katie Yamasaki will work with children ages 7-10 to tell their stories and make their own picture books.

Stories can be of any genre–fiction, fantasy, non-fiction, action, historical, memoir, anything goes! But Katie will also encourage participants to tell stories from their own, unique perspectives.

Participants are welcome and encouraged to bring their favorite book(s) to share the kind of stories they like and the type of art they want to make. Participants are also encouraged to think ahead of time about the story they would like to tell and come with some ideas!

Yamasaki will share some of her own work and process with the participants, and support each participant in realizing their own story in the picture book format.

This workshop is part of the programming for Lil’ Radicals: Multicultural + Social Justice Publications for Kids in the 21st Century on view from April 6-June 1, 2019.

Instructor Bio: Katie Yamasaki is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily as a muralist, children’s book author / illustrator and teaching artist. Yamasaki’s mural work has enabled her to travel widely, creating visual dialogues among diverse communities. From schools to prisons, housing occupations to hospitals, Yamasaki sees her art as a vehicle for dialogue, a tool for building platforms for communication. Yamasaki has painted over 80 murals around the world.

Another major focus of Yamasaki’s work is storytelling. She has published several books as both author/illustrator and illustrator only: Honda, The Boy Who Dreamed of Cars (illustrator only, Lee and Low, 2007); Lifelines, the Black Book of Proverbs (illustrator only, Broadway Books/Random House, 2009), Fish for Jimmy (Holiday House, 2013), When the Cousins Came (Holiday House, 2018), God’s Big Plan (illustrator only, Flyaway, 2019), Everything Naomi Loved (Norton, 2020), Dad Bakes (Holiday House, 2020) and the biography of her architect grandfather, Minoru Yamasaki, YAMA (Lee & Low, est. 2021).

Yamasaki earned BA at Earlham College and her MFA in the Illustration as Visual Essay program from the School of Visual Arts in 2003, where she is currently a member of the faculty. Prior to teaching at SVA, Yamasaki was a public school Spanish and Art teacher for 14 years. Yamasaki comes from a huge, diverse family, that is full of (among many other things), artists and teachers.