Week 1: How Should a Picture Book Behave?
What a picture book seems to do without trying — and what happens once you go looking for the rules underneath it.
Before the session
Bring one picture book you know well — yours, a sibling’s, a library one. Anything with pages and pictures works; you are not judged on the book, only on what you notice about it.
Rule Hunt
This is the main studio activity. Working from the book you brought:
- find at least five implicit rules that shape how it is read — not written rules, the ones nobody states because every reader already follows them;
- choose one of those five;
- make one rough alternative spread showing what happens when that rule disappears or changes.
The spread is exploratory, not polished. A sketch, a mock-up, a page with words crossed out and rewritten — anything that shows the rule breaking and what happens as a result.
This Week’s Misbehaviour — Find a Rule
A smaller, separate exercise from Rule Hunt, done in 15–30 minutes:
- notice one usually invisible convention in a picture book — it does not need to be one of your five from Rule Hunt;
- write down, in one sentence, what the convention is;
- briefly test what changes if you interrupt it — cover a word, read a spread right-to-left, skip a page turn, anything quick.
Keep the note short. The point is noticing something you would normally read straight past, not solving it.
Afterwards
Your alternative spread and your Find a Rule note are the first two entries in your Misbehaviour Toolbox — keep both. Next week starts from the same book: whether the picture on the page is really showing you what you think it is.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you bring one familiar picture book to pull apart
- you have found five implicit rules shaping how it is read
- you have one rough alternative spread breaking one of those rules
- you have completed this week's Misbehaviour, Find a Rule