The artist works with kids either over a few sessions, or a few hours, to create miniature illustrated booklets, fondly known as book dummies. Val discusses the illustration process from start to finish using examples from her own books, and places special emphasis on the critical aspect of maintaining character consistency throughout the book.

This workshop also highlights the collaborative nature of text and pictures, the basic concepts of layout vis-a-vis maintaining a readers' interest, and story-flow and pacing.

Students are asked to come to this workshop with a pre-written story (original or borrowed), allowing them to jump right into the book-dummy creation process.