Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure to go as visiting artist to a lovely primary school as part of The Big Draw.
The Big Draw is the world’s biggest drawing festival with thousands of drawing activities which connect people of all ages with museums, outdoor spaces, artists, designers, illustrators – and each other.
This international celebration of drawing has grown from one day in October 2000 in the UK to an annual month-long festival of drawing across the world.
This year the theme was Every Drawing Tells A Story and I designed a workshop for children where we looked at drawing our hands.
These were a class of year three’s (that’s about age 7) and we began the day with some fun warm-up activities like a timed continuous line drawing and then a charcoal rub which they then drew through with an eraser.
Oh what fun and happy mess that was! I had forgotten how kids can really maximise a messy activity – luckily it was before break-time and I could restore order to the classroom. All I can say to the mums and dads is sorry about your child’s school uniform  and I used to be a teacher! Shame on me – ha ha!
They learnt lots of new skills so they could draw a hand in proportion better.
And they also leant about tone and how to achieve that.
Then with all those skills under their belt we thought a bit about how hand gestures can communicate our feelings and they drew one.
All in all it was a fun-filled day and I came home with the sweetest evaluations forms from the children; all written in child speak and spelt phonetically saying how they’d enjoyed themselves and want to become artists. Thank you Big Draw it was a day we all enjoyed 🙂
