 Hello, I'm Jay-E. I am an artist and I'm a teaching artist and that means that I get to share some of my art practices with you. I like to make art a lot of different ways. Sometimes I dance, sometimes I work with technology, but one material I really love is paper. So today we're going to be exploring paper magic and storytelling. We're going to make a book like this that has words and pictures and it will be folded from a single piece of paper. But before we get started with that, we want to start brainstorming what our story might be. So what I like to do is take a piece of paper and divide it into four sections. And you can start a story a lot of different ways, but one way that people start stories is once upon a time. So you might start thinking about what that once upon a time is. Once upon a time there was a starfish who lived at the bottom of the ocean or once upon a time there were a big group of friends that all lived in a tree house together and then the next panel you want to add on to what happens next. What is the event that makes your story a story? So one day and maybe I have one day there was a big storm that came along and a bolt of lightning split the tree house right in half. And the third panel you want to have whatever happens next. So I'm starting it and then. So and then there was so much chaos, the tree house friends didn't know what to do. Some of them were really angry and some of them were really scared. They were fighting so much they didn't know if they could be friends anymore. And then in the last panel you want to be able to wrap up your whole story. So what do you say to have your story come to a conclusion or come to an ending? And a lot of times people will end their story with the end but you could also end it with to be continued if you have a lot more to say. So for me I might do but eventually the sun came out, the clouds went away and the tree house friends were able to venture out and clean up all the debris and they were able to build a new tree house community. And so one way to do this is you can do it all by yourself. But I really like this as a project that you can do with your friends or family. The way that you do it with your friends or family is you would start by having everyone have their own piece of paper and drawing your your four boxes and everyone would start their first panel. So once upon a time or however else you want to start your story and maybe you could put a timer like three minutes and then you would write your story and draw your story and then pass it on to the next person. So I'm going to go ahead and start drawing this and when you're drawing you can use markers or colored pencils really anything that you have on you. So in my first one, I'm going to begin writing. So once upon a time there was a big group of friends that lived in a tree house together and I might begin drawing my tree house and then I would pass it on to the next person and the next person would start the story their own way. So they might think that something else happens. So they might say and then one day an airplane crashed into the top of the tree house. Then you could pass it on to the next person and they would write the third part and the next person write the fourth part. You can also just pass this back and forth between two people. One thing that's pretty cool about doing this this way is that you'll be able to come up with ideas that are totally different from what you might have imagined to begin with. Now that we have an idea for a story we can start building our book. For your book, you can use any kind of paper. Notebook paper is okay. You could even cut up a paper bag to get your paper. What you want is a rectangle piece of paper. I'm going to use a piece of paper that's a little bit bigger than regular notebook paper just so that's a little bit easier for us to see. So to begin what you do is you fold your paper in half. And when you're folding you can use your hands but one thing that I really like doing is using a marker to help me with this crease because when you use the flat part of the marker you can get that crease so much tighter than you can with just your hands. Next what you can do is you can take this flap and fold it right to the end here to this crease that you made before and flip it over and do the same thing on the other side. Next when you unfold it you'll see that you have these four sections right and sort of like a w shape. That's pretty cool. Now what you want to do is you want to fold it the long way the opposite way. So you're going to fold against these creases that you just made and fold it all the way across. And if you look at your corners you can line up your corners nice and tight because you want this to be the corners to line up as much as possible and then again you can finish your crease. Now what we have is a piece of paper with eight sections. What we want is a hole that goes just down the middle. And so when I'm making this cut I like to be extra certain that I made the right cut. So what I do is I'll take a pencil and I'll draw right here down the middle so I know that my pencil goes from here to here and this is the part that I want to cut. I'm going to go ahead and fold it the opposite way so that my pencil mark can be seen. And when you're making your cut here you can use scissors if you have them and if you're using scissors you would just start cutting right along here to the edge so that you have a hole in the middle like this. The other way to do it is if you are ripping or tearing the paper. So you can tear the paper pretty effectively if you're really careful. When I'm using the tearing method it's extra super duper important to make sure that your creases are really tight when I wind up but that's okay I can redo it. So I know that this right here in the middle is the crease that I want to tear because I'm going to be using my hands to tear at this time. I want to make sure that I go back and forth with my crease so I'm going to crease it again on the other side but just in the middle part the part where I'm going to tear and once again on the other side just to be sure this sort of helps the paper have a memory of where it needs to be torn. So now I have this and I'm going to start right at this crease and rip it very carefully. I can even sort of pull the paper away and I'm doing it just until we get to that crease. Now I have my paper like this. We want to make our W shape again so it looks like this. With your W shape you'll see that there are two flaps here like this. You can take your flaps and pull them into a plus sign. It's pretty tricky sometimes to imagine but what you're doing is you're just taking this, you're pulling outwards and then you're starting to pull down until it becomes a plus sign. Then what you do is you flatten all of it into a book. So I have my plus sign and then this page starts to go in, this page starts to go in, this page starts to go in and I have it as a book. I want my creases to be tight again so I'm just going to go over each of these one more time so that I have something that is pretty tight like this. When I'm thinking about my story in a book form I know that I have a cover and on the cover you can draw an image of something that represents your story. Maybe it's the main character and you also want to put the name of the author which would be you. In the first spread, the first page you can think about what words you want to put in your story and the images or the illustrations that go along with the words that make your story, the add to your story. In the next spread you have your words and your picture again and then in the third spread you have your words and your picture. You might notice that in our first story we had it in four parts but this one we only have three spreads in here so another way to think about this is the first spread is the beginning, the second spread is the middle and the third spread is the end. So you can still do a similar story but you'll have to think about another way to put it into this format. I have a story that I already started working on and I want to keep working on the story. The story is called The Fair Weather Friends. So I started coloring the first page and in the first page I wrote out my words The Fair Weather Friends all live together in a big tree house. There's a little bit more to that but I'll save that for the end and then I have a picture of my tree house and some of The Fair Weather Friends. In the next part I want to start coloring my story. So I have my words and I have just the pencil outline of where my images are. You can use any sort of color so you have at home. You can use crayons, you can use markers, you can use colored pencils but my favorite way to color is with watercolor. So that's what I'm going to use for my story. Some people like to spend a really long time coloring and some people like to color really really quickly and both ways are okay. I'm starting by working on my yellow lightning bolt and because I already have my lines here this is almost as if you are using a coloring page just coloring in all those lines that you already made and this is the final book that I made and I would love to be able to share it with you. So the book is The Fair Weather Friends by J.E. and on the cover I have one of our friends just this long neck bird. On the first page it says The Fair Weather Friends all live together in a big tree house. They would sunbathe on the roof and plant flowery gardens. Things were good and The Fair Weather Friends were happy. And here we can see our tree house and some of our friends here and here and here I guess this is one of those flowery gardens and look at all those different sections of that tree house and I think that this is a yellow slide that goes down. On the next page we have but one day a big storm came along the wind blew and blew the wind blew the slide to the ground the rain made the garden into a swamp and a big bolt of lightning split the tree house right in half. Some of the friends were scared some were angry there was so much chaos the friends didn't know if they could be friends anymore. Look that's the slide on the ground we have that bolt of lightning that split that tree in half and it looks like there's big storm clouds on top and in our last section eventually the sky cleared up the wind stopped blowing so hard and the sun came out again. Things were different after the storm there were lots of pieces to pick up lots of things to fix but one by one the friends ventured outside and together they were able to rebuild and not the same but still magnificent tree house community. The end. Thank you so much for playing with me for drawing with me. I would love to hear your stories and I hope that you're able to share your stories with your friends and family. I'm Jiayi and I am an artist that loves paper.