The summer is a great opportunity for young ones to immerse themselves into new interests and gain new skills. This is why Cartoon Planet was invited to teach art workshops at the Bahrain Summer Festival for a couple of years in a row now.

Our Bahrain Summer Festival 2021 workshops focused on the stages of creating an illustrated story, from concept to print. Meanwhile, our 2022 workshops took on the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and set to make it more accessible to young adults by viewing it from a modern perspective.

The following is a summary of our summer festival workshops:

  • The Basics of Short Story Writing
    This workshop taught children what a short story is along with a walk-through of its basic components. It then showed them how to apply these creative writing concepts to write a real story.
    Instructor: Maryam Ali Abu Alfateh, Managing Director of the Young Authors for Education and Training, editor of the Young Authors’ Stories series
  • Short Story Development and Character Building
    Building on the Basics of Short Story Writing workshop, this class taught children how to further develop their short story ideas and how to build interesting and active characters for their stories.
    Instructor: Hussain Khalil Nusaif, author of Arabic-language children’s books like Wi-Fi in the Desert, Gilgamesh Again and Fast Walk.
  • Drawing Short Story Characters
    Based on the writing skills and tips on cultivating one’s imagination in the two prior workshops, this class tackled the visual side of short stories.
    This workshop demonstrated to children how short story characters can be developed, visualized and be brought to life using pen and paper.
    Instructor: Mohamed Almahdi, founder of Cartoon Planet and creator of the Artists for a Cause
  • Short Story Design and Printing

After learning how to write stories, come up with characters and then find a unique look for their narrative, this workshop tackled the specifics of how this story can brought out into the world.
Kids learned the steps their short story takes when they decide to publish it. They were taught about book-making from the design stages and into print.