School holiday sketchbook workshop
To start off the year I had the pleasure of kickstarting the Teen Maker Space program at the Victoria Park Library.
My topic was ‘Sketchbook Journalling’, inspired by the travel journals I keep while on holiday, but I was also asked to talk about overcoming perfectionism and the fear of the blank page - quite a lot to cover!
I had 16 teens booked in, and after a slow start (library tech being apparently cursed on the day, and the tv refusing to play ball with my iPad, meaning we had to watch my Keynote on the iPad, and I’d used that same tv with no problems before and had not brought my backup projector - lesson learned there!) we dove into sketch booking, journaling and ways to kickstart creativity. It was my first time presenting this workshop, and I’m confident future iterations will be bigger and better (and could also be presented to adults), but I think it went well!
Topics covered included:
How there are no rules for sketchbooks, your sketchbook is unique to you and there are no mistakes.
Ways to use a sketchbook as a travel journal
Other ways to use sketchbooks - using texts, comics, collages and themes.
How to overcome the terror of the blank page
Where to find inspiration - themed sketchbooks, online challenges, prompt lists and more.
A small sketching session.
I have no photos of the day, but for your viewing pleasure, here are stickers I handed out - which make perfect sense in context:
We discussed medieval animal paintings, as a way to feel better about our own sketching attempts - sometimes medieval artists hadn’t had the benefit of seeing the exotic animals they were drawing in real life (resulting in some truly hilarious bestiary illustrations), but sometimes they were drawing things that they had seen many times (horses, dogs, cats…) and they still look borderline insane - and that’s fine. But had medieval scribes had access to sketchbooks and themes ability to observe and sketch animals from life before they did their final paintings, I’m sure that extra practice and observation would have helped them. We’d have less crazy animals to amuse us now, though!
As a reminder of those drawings that don’t quite work still being valid, and the value of practice and sketching, I took 5 medieval animals and gave them some quick motivational slogans, printed them on sticker paper and cut them out with my cricut.
I had a great time giving this presentation, and hope the kids all left inspired and ready to sketch their holidays away!