Zig
POINTS AND ZIGZAGS
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Zig is a sharp, sparky, zigzaggy drawing friend, all corners and points, who can never quite keep still. Zig draws points and zigzags, up and down, up and down, like a little bolt of lightning.
"My house looks like a box," says Mo sadly. "It doesn't look like a house."
Zig zips over. "What's missing?" asks Zig.
Mo thinks. "A roof?"
"A roof!" says Zig, bouncing. "A roof is a point. Go up... and come down. Like a mountain."
Mo draws a line going up from one corner of the box, and down to the other. A pointy roof. And suddenly the box is a house.
"Points are everywhere," says Zig, zigging and zagging. "A point on top of a head makes a cat's ear. A little point on a face makes a beak. A point at the end of a fish makes its tail. Up and down, that's all."
Mo draws a cat next to the house. Two pointy ears. She grins.
"Now here's my favourite trick," says Zig, lowering its voice like a secret. "What happens if you draw a point, and then another point, and then another, and another, without stopping?"
Mo tries it along the bottom of the page. Up, down, up, down, up, down.
"A zigzag!" she says.
"A zigzag," says Zig proudly. "It's the same point, again and again. When something repeats like that, it's called a pattern. Patterns can make a fence, or grass, or a crown, or the edge of a whole picture, like a frame."
So Mo draws a zigzag all the way round the edge of her picture: along the top, down the side, along the bottom and up again. The house and the cat sit inside it, like a painting in a fancy frame.
That is Zig's sparky idea.
A point makes ears, roofs and tails. A point that repeats makes a zigzag pattern.
Try it with a grown-up! Take turns adding to one zigzag, one point each, across a long piece of paper. Can you keep the pattern going all the way? Then try a new pattern: two big points, one small point, two big, one small.
When the frame is finished, Zig finally sits still, just for a moment, and looks at it. "Up and down, again and again," Zig says quietly. "Calm and steady. I like a pattern."
Up, down, again. That's Zig.
The DoodlePals ensemble
Zig is one of the friends in DoodlePals. Each friend shows you one idea by how they act; meet them all and you have the whole subject.
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Scribble
Wobble first - Scribble, who draws wobbly lines on purpose: every drawer's lines wobble, so a wobbly line is not a mistake but how drawing looks - keep going
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Ovo
The oval inside - Ovo, who draws ovals and circles and finds them hiding inside things: heads, bodies, eggs and wheels all start as ovals
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Boxy
One shape at a time - Boxy, who builds big pictures from boxes and long lines, adding one shape at a time, so you never draw it all at once
