SLOP2261

Picture Books That Misbehave

Breaking the Rules of Visual Storytelling

Picture Books That Misbehave is a studio course about what happens when picture books break their usual rules. Students explore visual, textual, spatial, and narrative conventions, then break them with purpose through prototypes, reader testing, and revision. No polished drawing skills required.

The Question

What happens when a picture book refuses to behave like a normal book?

Who is this course for?

This course is for students interested in how stories work across words, images, pages and readers. It may be especially relevant to students in illustration, visual communication and design, animation, HCI, creative writing, media arts, comics and sequential art, storytelling, and education.

No formal prerequisite is required, and you do not need polished drawing skills. Collage, photography, typography, digital shapes, found images, paper cut-outs and simple drawings are all valid ways of working.

How the course develops

  1. 01Notice
  2. 02Break
  3. 03Construct
  4. 04Test
  5. 05Integrate

Each week takes one convention of picture books — a rule about pictures, words, sequence, page turns, or the physical page — and runs it through this progression: notice the rule that normally makes a picture book easy to read, break it on purpose, construct something from the break, test how readers respond, then decide whether that particular misbehaviour is worth keeping. A rule is never broken just for novelty — each break has to do something to the reader.

What will you learn?

01Read the rulesIdentify visual, textual, spatial and narrative conventions in picture books.Weeks 1–3, 802Break with purposeDeliberately break a convention to create a specific narrative or reader effect.Weeks 2–1103Design across words, pictures and pagesWork with the relationships between words, images, sequence, page turns and the physical page.Weeks 3–1104Design for the readerPredict and test how readers notice, interpret, navigate and respond.Weeks 4–5, 7–9, 11–1205Make a coherent misbehaving bookCreate original work where rule-breaking supports the story rather than existing only as novelty.Weeks 11–12

Where to go next

01WeeksThe twelve-week schedule and what happens in each week.02LecturesWhat is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.03AssessmentWhat is marked, what it is worth, and when it is due.04ShowcaseWhere student work will appear once it has been produced.