Budding writers and artists show off their chops

The blue-skinned girl with an orange gash on the side of her face stares plaintively at her audience, appearing to have a hard time explaining why a tree hangs upside-down, falling into the sky, behind her.

The work's young authors, Mackenzie Kerton and Dallas Page, were coy about the way their art has been drawn, refusing to flip it to better indicate their subject has fallen down from an unfortunate hike and that she is, in fact, on the ground, until someone asks them if that is the case. "Yes," the Grade 6 St. John Fisher Elementary students admit when asked.

With about 118 of their fellow students, Page and Kerton were enjoying the fruit of their labour at a vernissage in the school's library earlier today, after an approximately month-long collaborative project with older, Grade 8 peers at Lindsay Place High School. "This year, the high school students were visited by (Canadian artist and childrens' book illustrator) Rob Gonsalves," explained Christiane Corbeil, a Grade 8 French teacher at Lindsay Place. "We decided to make a project based on the images in his books," Corbeil said.

She approached two colleagues, Sophie Bureau and Mathieu Lavallée, Grade 6 teachers at St. John Fisher, inviting their students to an artistic collaboration.

The students from both classes then examined Gonsalves' art together, Corbeil explained, and Grade 6 students then dictated stories to their older peers based solely on the art they saw.

The older students then wrote down the stories and edited them, before returning the finished versions to their younger friends, who grouped into teams of two or three to draw a new piece of art based on the story. "We let them do paintings, collages, three-dimensional mosaics," explained Lavallée, adding the teachers tried to remain out of their students' way beyond offering them some guidance. "After showing them the (Gonsalves) images, we presented different surrealist artists to the students," Lavallée added, citing Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali or René Magritte.

For Kerton and Page, who had to visually present the story of an unfortunate but determined girl that twice attempts to hike up a mountain and twice fails, with disastrous consequences to her body, Picasso's style seemed a natural fit. "Picasso mainly does deformed faces," Page explained. For Grade 8 students at Lindsay Place, the project was a chance to develop their writing skills. "I like writing," explained Zachary Sykes, adding he hopes to do it professionally one day. Sykes pointed to a painting that made the cover of one of Gonsalves' books, the Governor-General's Award winning Imagine A Day, which depicts ghostly pale women rising out of a moonlit river in an evergreen forest, as the inspiration for a story written by him and his friends.

In yet another work by Grade 6 students, a collage by friends Stephanie Cowan, Megan Doucet, Kelsey Wong and Madeleine Davy-Smith, a house assembled out of various pieces is shown. "Our story was about a guy who didn't have enough money to make a house," explained Doucet, adding he wound up making it out of junk in their illustration, even though the prose story depicted him using strictly wood.

One of the house's walls is covered in pictures of smiles cut out from various magazines. "We went through so many magazines to get all this," explained Cowan. The smiles are representative of those that illuminate the faces of passersby who glimpse at the home, the girls explained.

According to the teachers in charge, this is not the first time the two schools have collaborated, although teamwork has been reserved to scientific projects in the past.