Learning about process with Shaun Tan

Stage 4

Learning about process with Shaun Tan

Students will use Shaun Tan’s original sketchbooks, oil sketches and final artworks for the picture book Dog to develop an understanding of the process of illustrating picture books, before creating their own illustration.

Focus text

Dog by Shaun Tan

Text type

Picture book

Learning intention

Students are learning to:

  • interpret and understand the impact of visual techniques
  • explore the way that visual texts are constructed
  • discuss aspects of texts and their own personal response to these texts
  • plan and create their own visual text.

Success criteria

Students will be successful when they can:

  • identify and analyse the impact of visual texts
  • explain the process of planning and creating picture book illustrations
  • discuss their own personal response to texts
  • plan and create own visual text.

NSW Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum English K-10

Outcomes

  • EN4-RVL-01 uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to read texts that are complex in their ideas and construction
  • EN4-URA-01 analyses how meaning is created through the use of and response to language forms, features and structures
  • EN4-ECB-01 uses processes of planning, monitoring, revising and reflecting to support and develop composition of texts

Content

EN4-RVL-01 

  • Explore the main ideas and thematic concerns posed by a text for meaning 
  • Engage with the ways texts contain layers of meaning, or multiple meanings 
  • Understand the ways reading helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world 

EN4-URA-01 

  • Use appropriate metalanguage to describe how meaning is constructed through linguistic and stylistic elements in texts 
  • Understand how language forms, features and structures, in a variety of texts, vary according to context, purpose and audience, and demonstrate this understanding through written, spoken, visual and multimodal responses 
  • Analyse how figurative language and devices can represent ideas, thoughts and feelings to communicate meaning 

EN4-ECB-01 

  • Engage with the features and structures of model texts to plan and consider implications for own text creation 
  • Reflect on own composition of texts, using appropriate technical vocabulary to explain choices of language and structure in line with the target audience and intended purpose 
  • Describe the pleasures, challenges and successes experienced in the processes of understanding and composing texts 
  • Consider how purposeful compositional choices are influenced by specific elements of model texts 

Text Requirements

Stage 4 students must study examples of:

  • Visual texts

LAC

Critical and creative thinking

Literacy 

Student Activities

Activity 1

Layout

Explore Shaun Tan’s layout design for Dog.

Number of set tasks: 1
An illustration of a woman and a dog with their backs to each other on a green and black background

Activity 2

Activity 3

Creating emotion

Stduents consider how particular emotions can be conveyed through visual texts.

Number of set tasks: 1
An oil painting showing a city street with a dog and person on each side of the road looking toward each other

Activity 4

The future

Students plan and create their own illustration for Dog.

Number of set tasks: 1
Storyboard of nine pages from Shaun Tans book Dog

Background information

In 2022 the State Library of NSW acquired artworks, sketchbook pages, storyboards and oil sketches created by Shaun Tan for his picture book Dog (2020). These works reveal the process used by Tan to develop the published picture book.

Tan has received more than 50 Australian and international awards for his illustrated books, as well as an Academy Award in 2011 for the film adaptation of his picture book The Lost Thing (2000). Dog first appeared in the award-winning Tales from the Inner City (2018) published by Allen & Unwin, before it was redesigned and published as a standalone title in 2020. In the same year, Tan, who is of Australian, Malaysian and Chinese heritage, became the first person of colour to be awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal — one of the UK’s oldest and most prestigious book awards for children’s book illustration.

Additional Resources

Information about the picture book Dog from Shaun Tan’s website.

Dog (2020) is a redesigned excerpt from my collection Tales from the Inner City (2018). A story in verse and paintings, Dog imagines the bond between humans and dogs as ongoing cycle of death and rebirth through different places and times, from prehistory to the present and future. Originally published by Walker UK in small format, it’s also available in a larger format from Allen & Unwin Australia (November 2020).

The relationship between dogs and humans is unlike any other. There are perhaps few inter-species friendships so epic and transforming, spanning some 15,000 years, enduring the vagaries of history, the rise and fall of countless societies, shaping each in turn. Every time I see people walking their dogs at my local park, I never cease to be heartened by the endurance and affection of this bond, its strangeness, its apparent naturalness.

But fates are never quite aligned and our hearts so frequently broken. For many years I’ve had a news clipping on the pin-up board that overlooks my desk, a picture of a dog whose owner died in a tragic house-fire. There is something about the dog’s hard-to-read gaze that I’ve always found compelling. It reminds me of many stories such as that of the famous Hachiko, the Japanese dog that waited patiently at Shibuya train station every evening, up to nine years after his owner, a university professor, had died suddenly at work. The sheer loyalty and urgent optimism of dogs has always been a great inspiration for their human companions, who so often wander from such virtuous paths and anxiously question their place in the world. No matter what future meets our planet, no matter how transformed or tragic, even apocalyptic, it’s hard to imagine that a dog will not be there by our side, always urging us forward.

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