In our series of ART & LANGUAGE lessons we invite you to explore the world of contemporary artists in the classroom. They are all members of the Visual Arts Circle, and they have given us exclusive permission to use their artwork to create lessons for the Visual Arts Circle website.

Art & Language Lesson 1

Charis Loke and the ‘Sorcerers Royal’

In our first lesson we take a journey through Charis Loke’s  illustration, a cover for a fantasy novel. The title of the artwork is ‘Sorcerers Royal’.

Charis Loke is an illustrator, visual storyteller and visual art teacher. She is based in Malaysia, and she also works on community arts and culture projects with Arts-ED Penang.

Aim of the Charis Loke lesson plan

The aim of this lesson is to explore a book cover visually and use it as a starting point to find out more about the story it illustrates. We start with the image as it is easily accessible for most students. By looking closely your students might come up with ideas which are surprising and unexpected for you, and we believe that real discussion starts like that.

Range of topics to explore during this lesson

1. The visual world of the illustration
2. The creative process of the illustrator
3. History: Regency Era
4. History and Geography: Globes and maps, exploring the world
5. Literature: Magic and fantasy novels

Here you can download the slides of the lesson plan in PDF format:

• VAC Resource 1_ Charis Loke (1)

You can also download the Teacher’s Notes in PDF here:

• VAC Lesson 1_ Charis Loke (1)

We hope you will enjoy this lesson!

This lesson plan was written by Nora Nagy , Arts & Pedagogy Coordinator of the Visual Arts Circle. Nora works as a blog writer (Helbling Readers Blog). She is also a PhD student in Applied Linguistics, and she’s writing her dissertation about multimodal literacy development. She teaches at Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.