OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK Evaluation

Overall - Everything for the project came together just at the right time to make everything work. As a group, even though our illustration work tends to be quite different, we work really well together - theres no friction between anyone and everyone did what they needed to do to make everything work, which I think overall is what made it such a success.

All of the previous collaborative work that i've done really helped me whilst doing this project. I've drawn together all the knowledge and experience of working collaboratively - from ordering the supplies on the Engineer's colouring book brief, to building the boxes for Thought Bubble; all of this has combined to make me really comfortable taking on different responsibilities in group work now with confidence, and I think our mutual eagerness is what made the project work so well.

We can now all say that we've worked with ANORAK Magazine in some way shape or form (which is still amazing!) and we're now on really good terms with Cathy, Ben & Jenny - and also Ollie Silvester and his girlfriend Sophie Khan, both of whom are 3rd year students at Winchester school of arts. The amount of connections and opportunities that are coming out of the back of doing it is really starting to pay off, and I really hope we can continue doing BLOOP-y things as we move on from the course!

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 9

The D&AD side of the Drawing Imaginarium was just as good as the first part was. Getting to spend time down in London with the rest of Bloop, Cathy, and all the other people who worked on the Imaginarium was a brilliant experience, we had so much fun. I was sad to have to leave my aquarium after touring it so much! 

One plus of being part of the London event, was that a lot more people wanted to know who we were, and wanted our contact details. I gave loads of business cards out for workshops, people were really interested in both ANORAK and the work we were doing as BLOOP - which was great!

The weekend was a bit of a blur from start to finish, and we were all really sad to have to leave it. However, Cathy has already mentioned that they're planning on doing another event further down the line, and she said she would love to have us involved in it again. So we'll have to wait and see what that brings for us!

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 7

The workshop went down better than we could have ever expected it would, and loads of people commented on how well we ran our workshop! It was a tough two days - especially the first one (we were outside all day and it was very, very, very cold and drizzly), but nothing went wrong, and working with Cathy and the rest of Team ANORAK was amazing.

One of the best things about working with kids is that nothing is too weird or too silly to them. We had crabs with 12 legs and giant anglerfish monsters that turned into puppets and so many more wonderful creations - being able to facilitate and get people excited about being creative was so much fun, we actually didn't want to leave!

We got this group photo before we packed up to leave and I love it. After all the weeks of organising that we'd spent getting it all together, it felt so good to be able to deliver everything and have it go well. 

It went so well, in fact - that Cathy asked us to join them for the D&AD event too! which is AMAZING! (this is our very excitable discovery of said invitation on our facebook group page:

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 6

Our supplies arrived! All the crayons, pens, scissors and double sided sticky tape you could ask for! It was a little bit like christmas - I may have to buy my own set of stuff from YPO again because of how cheap it is. Jessie very kindly covered the upfront payment (all of our expenses were reimbursed or covered by ANORAK) - and picked them up closer to the time of the first event at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

As for the Box - It was a bit of a beast, but also the perfect size, it turned out. I wanted to cut the front out, and paint the exterior white to neaten it, and also get ride of the bike logo across the back of it.

This is what it looked like after it's first and second coats. I approached painting it the same way I painted the Thought Bubble boxes - colour layer first, details and lines on top. It took me about 5 hours to paint it in its entirety. 

I know from experience that Cardboard will get ratty very easily if it's dragged about along it's surfaces - and even a layer of acrylic paint won't stop that from happening. To counter this, and also to neaten up the edges, I 'lined' them, using black duct tape - and I covered the entire underside base of it, to stop it from getting too beaten up. 

This actually proved to be a brilliant idea - because this survived being trawled all the way to Yorkshire Sculpture Park AND London almost completely unscathed - still looking good as new! I was very sad to see it go, to be honest.

With all of our bits arrived, we were all ready to go for the Drawing Imaginarium at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park! Very Exciting!

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 5

Given all the tasks we had to sort out, we decided to divide them up, so we could all concentrate on getting each one done. Jessie and Orlaith took responsibility for looking at ordering the supplies - me and Rosie made a start on putting the final worksheets together

I drew the one on the left, as well as all of the type by hand using Rosie's brush pen. I really, really like Pentel Brush pens, and I don't know why i don't own one myself, because they're brilliant for inking stuff. I think the lines on this look super good. The Submarine on the right was done by Rosie, which we also scanned and composited in photoshop. 

It felt really bizarre and weird putting our logo next to Anorak's! But we saved and sent these off - they were really happy with them, and took them off to be printed for the event. 

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 4

We got this email back from her, about the proposal - and she was more than happy with it, which was brilliant. 

Knowing that we were now definitely going to part of the event - we started to look at how we were going to source everything, what we needed to make, and any other bits we needed to sort out. 

We knew the worksheets would have to be properly sorted out - and we also needed to buy in materials for the kids to use, as well as put in an order for tools and materials from YPO, which i'd already identified was going to be one of the cheaper places we could buy all the pens and scissors in from. 

For materials - We knew of a place over near Pudsey, called Scrap. It's basically Costco, but for recycled materials - you pay a small membership fee and then you can buy any of the recycled material they have on offer there for a really cheap price. Its a perfect place for this kind of workshop! So we organised a Bloop work trip over there to pick some bits up.

The other task to tackle was the weird 'Box' we had proposed for the kids to take photos of their creatures in. Because i'd already done large-scale work during Thought Bubble, I thought it might be a good idea to drop Tom a message - to ask him some advice about how we should approach making the thing. Here's what he said:

As it turned out - Jessie had an old cardboard box that used to hold her old bike in, that was also enormous. Given the fact we were still waiting on concrete placing arrangements, and that anything made out of wood or canvas framing would have required a Van to transport it all, we decided that the cardboard box would be a better option to make it out of. Tom is still a massive help though, he's a super good contact to have! 

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 3

So Cathy came in to talk to us about her work, what its like running ANORAK and how it came to be. It was a really interesting and informative talk, especially seeing how it's grown from where it started to now. Listening to how she goes about commissioning and art directing was also cool - and nice to know for future reference if I ever want to send some work over to her!

After the talk - we went up as a group and introduced ourselves, as Bloop and discussed our idea with her. She was so lovely to chat to - she told us we all looked like a girl band (which was adorable) and coincidentally, the Aquarium theme we had gone with coincided with an upcoming issue of ANORAK that was 'Under the sea' themed (perfect timing!)

I think all of these paid off in our favour - because shortly after the talk she got back in touch with Matt and wanted information off of us ASAP! amazing!

We had another meeting afterwards, to put together a proposal document that we could send to Cathy to properly outline what our idea was. Here's what it looks like:

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 2

After drafting our initial ideas, we felt to make our pitch to Cathy and ELCAF a lot stronger - we needed to have some form of identity or brand to define ourselves with. We wanted something silly and fun - reflecting the sort of workshops we were interested in doing. 

We racked our brains for a while, before Jessie stumbled upon the word 'Bloop' - which is supposedly a large, unidentifiable sound thats made by a mysterious sea creature thought to live in the Mariana trench, which as perfect for the theme we were working on for the workshop. Plus - bloop is really fun to say a lot and we all really liked it!

We all went away and started drafting potential ideas for logos. These are what I did - but they definitely weren't the best. We all really liked the ideas Orlaith had come up with, and thought they fit the ethos behind our workshop group perfectly - so our new identity looked like this instead:

OUIL603 Extended Practice - ANORAK, Part 1

We had a briefing from Matt, telling us about two opportunities to help run artist workshops - one with ELCAF in London, who wanted a two-day workshop for their festival, and one for ANORAK magazine, who had an upcoming promotional kids illustration festival called 'The Drawing Imaginarium', to be held at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

After all the work I'd done as a Student ambassador and Thought bubble I knew immediately that they'd be up my street. I was really, really eager to get involved, and I had loads of ideas - but I also knew that it would probably be too big of a task to tackle on my own, given the size and scope of the workshops.

Luckily, after the briefing - Jessie Broad, Orlaith Conlon and Rosie Fairholm has stuck back in the studio. They were all really up for getting involved too, and were in the same boat as me - so we decided to club together and share the ideas we had!

Our initial idea was to create something like 'an Imagination station' - where kids could create their own creatures and monsters on a worksheet, then build them themselves out materials we could buy in. 

We were all really eager to have this sort of 'dual system' workshop structure - but we thought that creatures and monsters (as well as being over-done) were quite complex, and we wanted it to have some sort of educational/real tangible base in what they were creating, so we decided to go with an aquarium as a more specific theme instead. We all drew tons of 'draft' worksheets (which you can see above) to decide which formats would be the best to use for them. We also made a facebook page, to correspond with each other and to post all of our ideas/progress on!

After the session - Jessie made a more concrete list, which we could use to organise where we needed to go next.