Illustrating a Life

Mae

Sasha

Zane

Illustrations and text by eighth grade students

For our Art Exhibition, we illustrated Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri. The book follows Daniel, a young Iranian boy who had to flee to Oklahoma because his mother became a Christian. From there he had to start over in the United States. Everything Sad is Untrue is told through Daniel’s perspective and patchwork memory as he talks about his personal experience as well as tells stories he has heard throughout his childhood.

Bella

Colin

Mady

Kate

Xavier

We began this project as soon as we returned from our summer break. When we returned, each of us chose a part of the book’s storyline to illustrate and out of this, three stories would be drawn per person. Our next step was to go back into the book, reread the scenes, write what the emotions were, and how we could express that in our drawings. From there we sketched multiple ideas on how to draw the scenes with different types of media of our choosing. Each person then picked the sketch that we liked best and started our final piece for that sketch. We did this for each of our three scenes with the media we chose.

Kyle

Cooper

Giulio

Finn

Jackson

Ally

We learned many skills throughout this project, for example learning different types of media such as charcoal, watercolor, color pencil, collage, digital, and acrylic paint. As well as turning the book’s story into visual pieces of art with the help of this media. We learned skills about composition, color and illustration so we were prepared to jump right into this project. We visualized the events and stories within the book, bringing to life the tales of Daniel Nayeri.

Tessa

Mia

Daniel

Sandy

Dylan

Oskar