Activity Guide by Cally Carr, VISTA Service member
Grinnell College Museum of Art
About the Book
Beautiful Blackbird was written and illustrated by Ashley Bryan. Beautiful Blackbird is inspired by a Zambian folktale that emphasizes seeing black as beautiful as well as appreciating the beauty within yourself. Folktales are stories or legends that have been passed down for generations by word of mouth. Many folktales have been adapted into books, like this one, but the tradition remains to share these stories orally.You can listen to Ashley Bryan read Beautiful Blackbird. Listen to the emotion and rhythm in his voice!
Ashley Bryan creates colorful collages made from paper cut-outs to bring the story of Beautiful Blackbird to life. The birds each have a distinct shape and color about them; they are dynamic and feel alive. What sort of shapes do you see? And how do the birds interact?
Create
Ashley Bryan creates his bold, colorful illustrations with paper cutouts and so can you! Using construction paper you can create your own depiction of the Beautiful Blackbird story with birds, creatures and a scenery. You can also use felt, old magazine pages, a paper bag, or even notebook paper.
Start by drawing some birds or creatures onto your paper. Make sure you look at the dynamic shapes of the birds the Ashley Bryan creates when drawing your own. You can also create cut-outs of any creature, real or imaginary! Once you have your birds or creature drawn onto the paper, you can begin to cut them out. Take your time when you cut, but remember that there are no mistakes and if you cut past the lines you can always create a new shape! After you have finished cutting out the shapes, if you want, you can add details with markers or paint.
The birds aren’t alone in Ashley Bryan’s illustrations, there are colorful backgrounds that help create the scene. Ashley Bryan uses more cut-outs to depict the scenery in the image above. Once you finish cutting out your birds or other creatures, you will have some left over construction paper. Look at the natural shapes, do you see a wave or maybe some grass? Look at the negative space, do you see a heart or an arch? Look at the movements in your scraps, what sort of energy is present? Below are some of the scraps that I had from cutting out my birds. You can use these scraps to help create your scene!
Here are my finished creations! I used my paper scraps to create the boarder of my image and more scraps to give the blackbird a little bit of color. When putting your pieces together, think about how the colors interact as well as the movements of the birds. If you want, you can glue or tape down your scenery pieces and then attach a popsicle stick, pencil, twig or ruler to the backs of the birds to turn them into little puppets. You can also work together with friends by putting all of your pieces together to create a collaborative scene!
Write/Film
After you’ve finished putting together your collage, you can write a story about the birds or creatures that you created. Stemming from Ashley Bryan’s narrative of “Black is beautiful” from Beautiful Blackbird, what are some characteristics of your creatures that you want to highlight?
If you made puppets, you can create a short play or film by filming your puppets moving around. Think about how your puppets move and what sort of scenery they travel through.
Credits
Beautiful Blackbird won a Coretta Scott King Book Award in 2004 for the illustrations in the book and is included in Our Voice: Celebrating the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards, an exhibition organized by the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature, Abilene, Texas. The exhibition celebrates 50 years of the award and was scheduled for exhibition at Grinnell College Museum of Art for the summer of 2020. The physical installation was canceled due to COVID-19, but a virtual tour and videos about individual artists can be found at GCMoA’s YouTube Channel. Special thanks to Nick Glass and TeachingBooks. Learn more about Ashley Bryan.