Sketch The Rainbow Weekender

When: Saturday 26th - Sunday 27th January 2019
Where: The Create Place
What: See below!

To coincide with our #sketchtherainbow Instagram challenge and kick-start the year with some colour, we hosted a weekend of colourful creative workshops at The Create Place.

Sketchers came from all backgrounds, boroughs and cities to participate: in fact one (Francesca) came all the way down from Edinburgh especially for it! No pressure there then!! We also had a ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL ART TEACHER in the house, which was rather handy - and rather terrifying! It was great to hear about things from her side of the drawing board and to chat to others about their experiences of drawing at school: it’s always fascinating to hear how Art is taught and creative careers are valued (or not!) in difference countries.

Suffice to say it was a flippin’ fabulous weekend and we left bursting with energy, ideas and inspiration.
The best part? We got to keep this INK-CREDIBLE piece of collaborative art that you see below!

Day 1

Face-to-Face Time!

We warmed up with some fun speed-sketching challenges: drawing quick and colourful portraits of each other with our dominant and non-dominant hands, and with our eyes closed.

50 faces in 15 minutes

We worked our way through the rainbow and created colourful responses to a series of prompts, including an attempt to draw 50 faces in 15 minutes in the colour of your choice!

PASS IT ON!

We played a game of ‘pass the crayon’ (working title!) to help build our confidence in mixing and drawing in multi-colours. We all started with a different coloured chunky crayon, decided what we were going to draw and then started drawing it for a minute. We then passed our crayon on to the next person and drew for another minute: and so on and so on we drew, until we felt our pictures were complete and featured as many colours of the rainbow as possible! SO MUCH FUN!!

HANDS UP!

We tackled that trickiest of body parts to draw and speed-sketched hands in as many different styles, colours, scales and positions as possible - and the results were flippin’ marvellous!!

Tricolor Tributes!

We tackled one of the prompts from our #sketchtherainbow Instagram challenge: to draw this fab illustration by French Illustrator Claire Prouvost in your style.

We also did a few more draw it in your style challenges using a Dulcimer Draws risograph…

Then we totally ran out of time so rounded the day off with a ‘choose your own out of all the challenges we didn’t quite get around to yet’ challenge! Suffice to say, it was colourful and there were boobs!!

And finally: we squeezed in a quick group shot at the end of the day!

Day 2

It was a pretty grim day outside, so to warm everyone up we got straight to it and hit the bottle - of ink that is!

As per the day before, we attempted to draw 50 faces in 15 minutes: only this time collaboratively, on a giant roll of paper and using neon and coloured inks! It took the group around 40 minutes to create this INK-CREDIBLE banner - TEAM WORK MAKES THE DREAM (ART)WORK!! It did however, take about 10 minutes for us to get it out the door and take photos of it outside… :)

ALL HANDS ON DECK!

The hand-drawing challenge went down so well on the Saturday we decided to bring it back but up the ante and get everyone drawing hands on another table-sized page.

FACE-OFF!

After lunch, we kicked things off with a quick round of portrait drawing: creating quick and colourful sketches of each other with our left and right hands, with our eyes closed, and with both hands at the same time - which is way harder than it sounds!

Colourful Cutbacks!

Using a restricted colour palette, we created a series of A3 collaborative pieces - each with a different theme. Our themes included Kusama, Kitchen, Warhol, Monsters and WILD! Some of the resulting images are so unified that you’d never know that multiple artists created them!

50 Faces - INKED!

We played another game of our ‘50 faces in 15 minutes’, only this time using ink! Not sure anyone managed 50 faces - but the results were FLIPPIN’ FAB!

The end of Veganuary is nigh!!!

The Showstopper!

For the last hour or so, everyone had the opportunity to create a large-scale illustration on a theme of their choice. That could’ve been a daunting task for some at the start of the workshop, but by this point everyone was buzzing with creative confidence and got straight in there! They produced some amazing work: featuring everything from animals and monsters - to cityscapes and chairs!

And then…. we all went home feeling knackered, inspired and covered in ink!

THANK YOU to everyone who came - we had an absolute blast! Shall we do it all again next year?!