Picture This: A Room with a View.

Yesterday I attended my second event of Innovative Learning week; a sketchbook workshop which was run by Mary- a tutor in Graphic Design here at the ECA. It was quite daunting at first as whilst I used to be really into doing my sketchbooks all fancy and making sure they were the envy of any class I was in, I have recently got myself in to an awful sketchbook rut. Some help there was desperately needed! 

Our day started as it meant to go on, hectic, slightly perplexing but fun! Firstly we discussed the idea of a line and how we could use something as simple as a singular line to portray all kinds of emotions and events- from depression to bees making love and everything in between! I honestly had no idea there even was such thing as a depressed line until I had to come up with something on the spot (the mouth of a frowny face)! The funny about this is that most people had quite similar opinions about what different things should be like- we decided that ‘magnificent’ was an ascending line with a sense of stability, unlike ‘splendid’ which was more free and had a strong feeling of movement to it. Then it was time to introduce some colour! Experimentation included using a mixture of both this and our lines to create interesting and emotive images which clearly communicated a point of view.  It was interesting to see what colour people associated with places like the hospital. I thought red but my friend thought blue.

A boat showing movement.

My favourite part of this workshop was the addition of some collage- I love a bit of mess and any day that you get to use PVA glue and a spreader is going to be a good day! We continued the task of communicating emotion and feeling through our thoughtfulness- with Mary continually reminding us, ‘Less is more!’Finally, we finished our morning session with what I thought was one of the most confusing things ever, but actually turned out to be alright once I had got my head around it; choosing an emotion(trapped, freedom, awestruck or inspired)and showing this through collage but only using words. Okay, so it doesn’t sound too difficult now but at the time my brain would just not get in gear!

Overall I had a really fun morning; it was very refreshing to look at my sketchbook more from the graphics and illustration side of things! I am now going to have to have a look over my sketchbooks to make sure that I haven’t passed any angry subliminal messages through badly placed lines! Hopefully I am out of my two year sketchbook rut. Only time will tell. 

A hilltop town.

A hilltop town using silhouette