Making Art

So is anybody else excited about what Neil Gaiman is up to? Just the other day, he send out questions on twitter, 12 to be exact, to get inspiration for stories. More precisely, Gaiman is creating a Calendar of Tales, 12 stories inspired by tweets from people around the world and illustrated by people around the world.

If this isn’t a great idea, I don’t know what is!

I follow Gaiman on Twitter, so I read a lot of these tweets as they came in. Gaiman was impressed with what people shared and so was I. It was interesting to see

Gaiman joined up with Blackberry to make this happen. And now, the stories are written and it’s time to send in illustrations to these stories. The work of 12 artists will be selected by Gaiman and have their work made into a website, an e-book as well as a real life book. So if you have any creative talent, go make art.

I’ve read the 12 stories and what I like the best about them, is the process. Gaiman has read all these tweets and then chosen one for each month. It’s so fascinating to see how the tweets he wrote, inspired people or tricked a memory and this in turn then inspired Gaiman to write his stories – and now, his stories are out in the world to inspire visual artists to create illustrations for these stories. It’s a wonderful project.

You can read more about the project here as well as watch a cool video featuring Gaiman.

And if you go here instead, you can download a pdf with all the 12 stories as well as see some of the artwork that has already been submitted.

And I now know not to ever play poker with ducks.