*** EDIT ** PLEASE NOTE
This set of ELLI animal character icons are now available to buy & download in my print shop
***
I was contacted recently by a teacher at St Ninian's High School in the Isle of Man, who had been researching ELLI: The 'Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory' with his pupils. If you haven't heard of ELLI, it's all about learning to be the best YOU there could possibly be, whatever your age and stage of life, and when relating to children this system often uses a set of 7 animal characters to help explain the different learning traits.
The pupils had been asked to design a poster to help promote the ELLI ideas around the school, and whilst in the process of doing this they had discovered a set of ELLI characters I had created for a previous project online.
My original set of ELLI Character Icons
I was asked if I would be willing to take a selected student design and work it up using my characters. With commercial projects, when a client gives an illustrator a sketch to show them exactly what they want it can be a little annoying, but in this instance I was happy to help them with realising the student design.
The original student design
I quite liked the Tortoise relaxing under the tree in the original design, but for the final version we agreed this didn't necessarily depict resilience!
Pictured below is my worked up version of the poster...
I have children of school age, so it always interesting for me to work on projects which relate to learning. I have also done some work on Growth Mindsets, and in fact it was a follow on from that project which led to me creating these ELLI characters in the first place. That project can be seen on my website here
It also fascinates me how one project leads to other things, and the power of the internet. I look forward to hopefully working again sometime in this area.