Final Workshop - The Shrubberies

The end of the project is near now, I can't believe how fast it has gone and I'm sad that it is ending, its been great spending time in Leonard Stanley and with the people in and around the village. I have enjoyed getting everyone involved with Stanley Spencer's work, and getting people looking into the Village Life painting more. People have made connections with the painting when it was first done, and shown these in their own creative explorations now.

My next job is to put together a selection of the work produced by the various groups to present to the public at some point in the future.... I shall update here soon as it is done.

The last workshop I ran was at The Shrubberies School, which caters for young people with special educational needs. I worked with pupils across a whole age range and made salt dough models of their surroundings.

Here we have the local duck pond (although a small whale seems to have invaded!)

Some of the local buildings and houses

Family Learning Workshop

Today I worked with 2 families in the village doing a similar workshop to the work I did with Maidenhill. So we aimed to look at character in faces and create these in wire.

We began with drawing each other and characters from the 'Village Life' painting using continuous line drawings. These help in translating the drawings into wire.

We had a look at different tools for using with the wire and using different types of wire for different effects

 After a bit of concentration the wire drawings stared to come together and look like the initial drawings

 The finished pieces...

...you may spot some people from the original Village Life painting... 

Highborder Lodge Workshop

The latest workshop on Thursday was with residents at Highborder Lodge in the village, just a small group of us. We began with some drawings of our surroundings and moved on to some printmaking.

The drawings were used to inspire the prints, first of all we tried mono printing...

 ...and had a go at press printing too

Maidenhill School workshops

We began todays workshops by looking closely at the Village Life painting and using the ideas of expression and characters features. From this we made some creative drawing using ink and stick and continuous line drawing, these came from observing photographs of school life and drawing animated features of other pupils.

Using these drawings we began to manipulate different wire to make similar shapes and features to our drawings.

Some of the work very closely resembled the drawn images and key features taken from the original images. Some really great work, only a selection of it here though!

Village Fair

I went to the Village Fair on Saturday with the intention of working with as many people in the community as possible. The torrential rain didn't help. Though I did manage to relocate from the muddy field to inside the church (phew). After a while the sun came out bringing the residents with them. I had a small display of some of the work made so far in the project, along with a copy of the village life painting, this certainly proved a talking point.

Participants had a go at mono printing and created some images of the days events and memorable objects (a lot of cakes went by!)