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Donovan Bixley's author/illustrator visit

He arrived by taxi, after spending time at the Auckland Writer’s Festival where he presented his writing and illustrations to many eager visitors, exchanged ideas with Lauren Child and networked with other local and international authors. There was time for a quick chat and then Donovan proceeded with his schedule, visiting our middle and senior classes. 

We were treated to a visually fascinating presentation on a projector and we watched Donovan drawing on a flip chart. He weaved a fascinating story about his thought processes in creating characters through illustration, before writing about them in his stories. We met characters like Claude D’Bonair, Katerina Snookums and Sid Fishus from the Flying Furballs series, and Jimmy Grimholt from Monkey Boy (“part comic, part novel, all action”).  
Bixley has illustrated books with famous authors like Margaret Mahy (Dashing Dog), and Kyle Mewburn who visited us last year (The Dinosaur Rescue & Dragon Knight series) and many others. He has illustrated over 100 books and written 15. If you would like to read more about Donovan Bixley, there is a double-page spread in the latest Woman’s Weekly covering his story. In the afternoon we had an illustrating workshop for a small group of enthusiastic comic drawers which hopefully inspired them to bring expression to their characters through emotion and perspective.
 

We hope many children made connections between drawing, writing and sequencing. When the day was up, Bixley caught a taxi to the airport to fly home to Taupo, where he will begin working on the fourth Flying Furballs book. We are grateful to the NZ Book Council for partly sponsoring his visit and extremely thankful that Donovan Bixley visited us and shared his fascinating career with us, with such enthusiasm.

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