Spotathon 2016 has come to an end and we have been overwhelmed and touched by the amazing response the campaign received from the illustrator community.

The idea for Spotathon came from what we saw as a need for affordable spotting book for children. Spotting books are a wonderful way to engage children (small ones, big ones, and yes… very big ones!), can help develop pre-reading skills in the smallest bookworms and most importantly they’re just SO MUCH FUN!

So we asked illustrators to share one spotting illustration and answer key and upload it to StoryWeaver and create a mini spotting book with their entry. We also hoped that the campaign would familiarise illustrators with how they can share their work on StoryWeaver through the very easy Image Uploader. 

From deep underground to outer space!

Illustrators looked far and wide for inspiration for their Spotathon illustrations. From outer space shenanigans to life underground, we saw an amazing variety of themes emerge that are sure to delight children and keep them busy spotting.

 Zainab Tambawalla's 'The Crazy Circus' 

 

  Kabini Amin's 'Forest Friend's Party'

 Kavita Singh Kale's 'Nainital, a Wonderful Hill Station in India' 

 

We were overjoyed to see  illustrators we’ve worked with in the past, like Rajiv Eipe, Soumya Menon, Niloufer Wadia, Greystroke and Samidha Gunjal take part. And equally delighted to see new artists join in the spotting fun too! 

We'd like to share two small stories, that are a testament to the power of open source and joyful reading!

Cyrille L'Argillier, a community member has translated a number of Spotathon entries to French showing how open licences can really give content wings and help stories take flight. We hope to see many more translations of the Spotathon mini activity books in the days to come, so that more children can enjoy them in languages of their choice.

We received a lovely email from Annapoorni Trichur, a teacher with E-VidyaLoka and Udaan in Hyderabad. She shared Megha Vishwanath's "An Evening in the Spice market" with her students. Here's what she had to say: "They were so engrossed looking for things in the picture they didn't even realise they were learning!"

In the next few weeks, we'll be working on putting together an e-book with the best entries from Spotathon. This will be published on StoryWeaver. But do remember that each entry to Spotathon can be enjoyed on its own, as a mini-book.

We hope you enjoy the spotting books that have emerged from this lovely campaign. If you’re an illustrator, remember that you can upload your work to StoryWeaver with great ease. Your doodles, black and white sketches, line drawings… do consider sharing them with the world under the CC-BY4.0 license on StoryWeaver.

We’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, feedback to share on Spotathon then write to us at [email protected]

 

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Soumya Menon is an animation filmmaker and illustrator trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She likes to travel often, and try her hand at other occupations such as painting walls. Soumya shares how she took Reeti from 'Reeti and Mithu' from a rough sketch to a young girl bursting with colour. You can follow Soumya on Twitter, Instagram and her blog.​

I wanted to set the initial scenes for this story indoors- in small, confined spaces, to try and draw a parallel between Reeti being trapped indoors (as she's moping at home during the summer holidays) and Mithu in his cage.

In the last series of images towards the end of the story, I wanted to introduce a sense of flight and movement, as Reeti returns to school and her friends (not mentioning Mithu and what happens to him as I don't want to give away the ending here!)

 

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