Category Archives: Workshops

A fabulous flotilla

Yesterday was the official launch of the Black History Month exhibition I’ve been involved with at Sutton House, a Tudor National Trust property in Hackney. The project began for me when I designed a set of commemorative stamps for nine Influential Black Londoners, which go with letters written by historian Miranda Kaufmann based on research by a team of volunteers led by Patrick Vernon OBE.

The second part of the project has now started, where I run a weekly workshop based on each of the historic figures with a different local primary school. The first looked at Henry VIII’s trumpeter, John Blanke, and the children each made a woven paper square with their own invented heraldic emblem on it, which I’ve mounted as a group hanging from a trumpet. Then the children each wrote a letter to John Blanke, and posted it in the giant envelope. Week 2 looked at the Lascars, and we had a total of 60 children making paper boats to represent the cargo-laden ships the Asian sailors travelled on. I like the one with the tiny lifeboat on board.

The exhibition will continue to grow each week until the end of November.

Covers of distinction

I’ve just spent two days in the Elephant and Castle, at London South Bank University with 9-13 year-olds from various local schools. It was all part of ShoutSouth!, a children’s writing festival organised by CWISL (Children’s Writers and Illustrators in South London). All sorts of writers and illustrators for young people ran workshops aimed at getting the children enthused about writing stories – and the pencils were flying! Many exciting stories emerged in the group I was with, and my job was to get them to design covers for their master-works in the final session.

To begin the workshop I showed everyone a set of images from the fantastic 50 Watts website, which is a tremendous resource for those interested in the history of graphic design. Recently they posted the results of a competition to design book covers influenced by Polish designers of the 50s and 60s, and I thought these could act as a good point of inspiration with their bold designs, simple lines and striking colour choices. A small selection of the children’s work is shown above: I specially like the highly ornate golden treasure chest watched by a sinister pair of red eyes, and the cover for ‘Waiting for the Wind’ where a whole village is encased in a bell jar with mysterious footsteps leading out of it. The bottom-left cover is for an as-yet untitled work about a homeless man and his dog, and the cover really sets the scene for a sense of urban alienation. ‘The Soul Keeper’ tells of a tribe who have seahorses tattooed on the back of their skulls, while ‘Shhhh…’ is about a carved elephant containing secrets of the French revolution. Meanwhile ‘The Giant Mutant Monkey’ has a secret weapon – pinecones which are filled with tiny knives.

It was great fun working with everyone, children, authors and illustrators, and I hope one day I will be able to read the full stories.

The trees happened to turn yellow…

This afternoon I’ve been at Sacred Heart Primary School in Battersea making books with Year 4 – and a very enjoyable afternoon it was too. I gave each child a little surprise lucky bag with a mixture of collage scraps and random words, and the challenge was to invent a story and make the spreads into different scenarios for a character to discover. They were a terrific class, full of exciting ideas and bold in their vision, and they created some remarkable work in the two hour session.

I specially like the title ‘The Trees happened to turn Yellow’ – it sounds like a chilling sci-fi novel from the 1950s. And I would love to read ‘Ruby and Sunshine Swoop Through Town’, with its boundary-busting 3-d design, it looks full of fun. The stark simplicity of ‘Dog’ rather appeals too, and the 3-d ladybird emerging from behind a leaf is genius!

The project was part of an arts week at the school organised by Pinksie the Whale, and the school had been beautifully decorated for the occasion, with fabric-wrapped trees and plastic bag blooms creating a wonderful welcome.

 

 

Woolly mammoths and wheely houses

Once a week I deliver an art class for under 5s. I love it when they come through the door asking “what are we going to make today, Jane?”.  And it’s a great excuse to read books by some of my favourite fellow illustrators, and invent an activity that ties in with their stories. In the montage above are a very hairy pair of tusked mammoths inspired by Neal Layton‘s ‘Oscar and Arabella’ (I have one little girl at the class who loves to go crazy with the eyes), a mini 3-D landscape of a stream and stepping stones prompted by ‘Muffin and the Expedition’ by Clara Vulliamy, and some marvellous mobile homes that we made to go with ‘Home’ by Alex T. Smith. The jewel-eating-treasure-chest monster has yet to be written, I think…

Sausages and peas ahoy!

Here are a few more ideas from my weekly under 5s art class – ‘my favourite meal’ is always a popular one, and I like making 3-d eggbox islands too. Lentils are perfect for a pebbly beach. The ocean liner pirate vessels loaded with treasure were fun too…

Paper chips and a cotton wool storm

One of the favourite parts of my week is the art class I run for under 5s. I have a cupboard full of materials from sparkly treasure to googly eyes (everyone’s favourite) to plain old lentils, and they all come in handy for sticking projects. Usually I take inspiration from a picture book (after the ‘making’, I read the children a story) and try to tie it in with the activity. Here are a few projects – I’ll post some more soon. I try to keep the projects flexible and as much open to individual interpretation as possible – I really enjoy seeing how differently they come out through young creative eyes and hands. I would love to make an illustrated activity book based on them all some day…

Leaves within leaves – a Denys Lasdun mural

How do you get nearly 600 children to participate in a school mural project? That was the challenge to be tackled when Hallfield Primary School in Bayswater invited me to come and fill some empty display boards in one of their curving corridors. The school was designed in 1951 by architect Denys Lasdun to be filled with light, curved spaces and tree-filled courtyards – it is a real gem. Lasdun’s original concept drawings for the school showed the classrooms as leaves, dining area as pea pods and hall space as a flower. This seemed a good starting point for the mural – a black and white outline over blocks of colour, with a leaf for each class just as Lasdun had planned – except that now there are 24 classes in the school.

Over the last couple of weeks the teachers have been working with their classes to make leaves using different media and carefully controlled colour palettes so hat the resulting leaves could be divided into four seasons. The result was hundreds of miniature works of art, in pastel lines over painted patterns, printed from real leaves, in pen, collage and chalk. I used hairspray to fix chalk and pastels, but charcoal was a bit more challenging. I’d also recommend checking any marker pens for bleed first. Having painted the background shapes I then used pva to glue all the small leaves within the big leaves – and now it’s finished.

I’d been at the school in February for a drawing project and it was lovely to be remembered by lots of the children. I also enjoyed hearing them rehearse their school production of ‘Skellig’ while I worked.

 

Swimming, swimming, swimming – and running



I’ve spent the last two days at Meadlands Primary School in Ham working with Nursery, Reception, Year One, Year Four and Year 6 on a big Olympics-themed frieze.

The younger classes began by mixing colours and creating printing blocks with foam sheets from the marvellous Work and Play scrap store in Tooting.

Next we cut out the printed waves and pebbles and stuck them on a huge blue roll of paper, also from the scrap store. These represent the swimming pool and running track. The collage also included bits of old maps and circles cut from catalogues with my badge-maker circle-cutter.


Next Y4 and Y6 looked at reference pictures of sports and created their own running and swimming printing blocks. We inked them up with rollers and printed them on the paper overlaying the background collage.

Finally we added some text in a flowing line using some old letterpress blocks lent to me by mosaic artist Sue Edkins. I also did a Q&A session in assembly about being an illustrator. Lots of budding illustrators at that school are already making their own comic books at home – wish I could have seen them.

 

 

 

Shells, pinecones and a mini-Eiffel Tower

drawing_spread

I took my bags of mystery objects over to Bayswater this week, for three days of drawing workshops at Hallfield Primary School – an Arts Council funded project organised by LONSAS (London Schools Arts Service). I was working with Year 2 and Year 4, teaching different drawing techniques. I was there on World Book Day and had a room full of Snow Whites and Spidermen! This also gave me the chance to try out the book I’ve illustrated, Duck Sock Hop by Jane Kohuth (out in May) – and they loved it and laughed on every page…and then asked for my autograph! Great fun.

The objects in bags were popular – it was lovely to see the children listening for the sea with the shells and really looking at the detail. Some of the drawings they produced while looking at the object not the paper were fabulous, and so well observed.

It was a great school to work in and I am hoping to do more with them in the future. It’s also a fabulous listed building by Denys Lasdun – you can find out more about the buildings here – apparently the whole site is based on flower petals, and all the corridors are marvellously curved.

Don’t take your hand OFF!

I’ve been at Grand Avenue Primary School in Surbiton working with year 5 teaching them drawing skills. Each child had a bag with an object in, and they then had to draw it four ways, then swap and draw another object four different ways. There were wails of dismay at the idea of using the ‘wrong’ hand and not taking hands off the paper, but some excellent results. This was followed by a mixture of drawing and collage based on reference pics of old buildings, and a session drawing portraits.rivercontinuousline