24 May 2012
If you’ve followed this blog recently you’ll know I’ve been working in schools running art workshops alongside my graphics and illustration work for sometime now and am now officially part of the collective, Classroom Creatives. The upshot of all this is really rather lovely in that I’ve started to get ’special requests’ such as the one I had a few weeks back from a lovely year 5 teacher who was planning her terms project work on the water cycle and was not surprisingly, feeling a little stumped, as to how she might create a river with the children. In 3D.
We planned a fantastic art workshop for her class and I spent two fun filled afternoons with her 30 very enthusiastic artists creating ‘Swans-Ville’ – a 3D landscape created out of recycled materials complete with a river of discarded water bottles filled with blue jelly, flowing down to the beach; a model town complete with hospital, church and pub and a plathora of countryside and river animals. The children then painted various backdrops with differing cloudscapes, and lo and behold, we had our very own enormous and rather wonderful, sculpted landscape ‘teaching aid’, whereby the children can now explain the water cycle most efficiently. Oh and they do – with proud grins on their faces to boot. Well done Swans Class. Good job :-)
For the full gallery of photographs, pop over to The Classroom Creatives Facebook Page.
23 May 2012
For the last couple of years or so, I’ve been leaning more and more towards the work I do as a sideline (to my everyday design and illustration work as ‘Wallop!’), teaching Art and design in various forms to primary school aged children. It’s something that I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed and I’m delighted to have now become a partner in a collective of artists who offer bespoke and unique Art workshops more widely to KS1 and KS2 pupils in and around our local area of Hampshire.
My partner in crime and I, Kathy Mason, who have worked together in school for some time now have just launched ‘Classroom Creatives’ with a Stopgap flash website in situ and a facebook page. Please do go and have a peek. A ‘like’ would be even better to keep up to date with our events and offerings.
To Kick Start our new collective we wanted a logo and a look that was fun and entertaining, so would appeal to our young artists but was also professional and business like for those Art Co-ordinators who might commission us. The brand I came up with combines simple sans serif type with a ‘doodled character ‘ formed by combining the initial ‘C’s of the two words. This character can be altered to become a different gremlin or doodlebug for the different uses of the logo and lends itself perfectly to be animated blinking or swaying for our online purposes.
Our new brand appears on the web pages and litererature we send out to schools and also on sets of badges and certificates awarded to the participants of our workshops.
We’re looking forward to a happy and successful future, sparking the imaginations of our young artists, one school at a time :-)
Watch this space to follow our progress :-)