Big Draw’s National Launch is Sunday 30 September, with a massive all-day event of free drawing activities held in 20 venues within Tower Hamlets and Hackney, London. Educational charity The Campaign for Drawing’s month-long flagship event, The Big Draw then continues in over 1,000 venues across Britain and beyond, with innovative drawing-based events throughout October for adults and kids alike.
Last year 350,000 people got involved and activities kick of this Sunday at 10.30am with campaign patron and artist extraordinaire Quentin Blake and Big Draw East: Drawing Things Together. Blake will release a flock of paper birds at the Museum of Childhood. Celebrities, architects and cartoonists will all contribute to a giant ‘Big Picture Frame’ in the Museum Gardens next door – including Andrew Logan, Posy Simmonds and Adam Dant. The celebrations continue until late with a knees-up at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.
More than anything else, this is a rare chance for the public to get involved and to work alongside top architects, engineers, artists and scientists. In a cute currency exhange, a shuttle bus will link the 20 venues all day with the fare simply being a drawing!
These are not your average drawing classes but weird, wacky, serious and funny drop-in activities designed for everyone to get drawing. You can join the Bug Party at SPACE and take a closer look at insects in eco-artist Brandon Ballengee’s Love Motel. Learn how to bind a secret notebook of invisible drawings at Sutton House (National Trust). Create sensory postcards and stained glass windows using hand lenses at Eastside Educational Trust. Catch the ArtBoat as it sails between the Ecology Pavilion and Queen Mary, University of London. Use special viewfinders to explore the city’s public face and changing skyline at the stunning Allen & Overy building, One Bishops Square. Or create your own currency and barter your drawings at The Drawing Stall in Spitalfields Market! Check out the printable pdf Big Draw East programme online or pick up a printed programme including crazy pencil maps from any of the venues.
So who is behind an event of this scale?
The Campaign for Drawing is a tiny organisation, testimony to the amount achievable by a few driven individuals – they have only two full-time staff.
For the launch, the Campaign partnered with 32 organisations. Recent MBE recipient Sue Grayson Ford is director of the operation, and works alongside administrator-come-events coordinator Lisa Howard. Arts Hub spoke to Lisa about which of Sunday’s events enter at the top of the arts innovation ladder.
Lisa explains, “The workshops at Queen Mary in Mile End are unique in connecting biomedical scientists with artists. Participants view cells of embryonic zebra fish through the microscope. Inspiring your own drawings of hybrid animals, or of what is traditionally called hybrid mutations, to see what bizarre creatures people come up with. The point is, at the initial cellular stage of development, every animal combination is naturally possible! Say, a fish-human-donkey!”
When Arts Hub asked if this was also an exercise in pushing ethics, as well as drawing, Lisa responded, “Apparently most embryos are the same in the beginning. ‘One Cell Made Me’ [the activity’s name], allows participants to see how animals develop. If you get back to the very basics, all organisms are the same.” Working on electronic whiteboards, the drawings are then taken into the lab for identification.
The events at Queen Mary aim to demonstrate how drawing has a huge impact on science – historically, and today. With Bow Arts Trust and the London College of Fashion also partner organisations, other integrated activities include fashion illustrating, paper manipulation to make paper cloaks, and having your face transformed to represent your hybrid fish! Quentin Blake will be joining the fun at 11:15am.
In the V&A Museum of Childhood’s Summerly Room a gigantic new city is being built out of paper and card, run by British artist Steven Follen (of London Metropolitan University), who drummed up the idea out of one of the Big Draw’s themes, Changing Cities.
Lisa Howard says, “Every wall, pillar and floorboard will be covered in paper, and you can draw the roads, the pedestrian cranes and traffic lights – everything! The landscape is built up throughout the day by drop-in participants.”
The “Move Along Please” activity also at the Museum will help build the buses, bikes, cars and tubes to travel through the ever expanding landscape. Professional portrait artist Mark Lewis workshops sketch people as they move around the space, capturing the hustle and bustle. Lisa states, “It’s going to look great because nothing will be to scale!”
Across the way in York Hall is the “Zero Carbon Flying Machines” activity, presented as Shape The Future nation-wide competition. Lisa Howard is really excited. She animates the movement of planes with her arms and says, “With the help of professional engineers, the idea is to design the lowest cost airline on the planet! It is a brand new spin on paper flying machines!”
Lisa Howard is an artist in her own right. “I’ve been an advocate for making art accessible. People feel intimidated to try to draw. But they need not worry about the way a drawing looks – it’s just a form of expression. It’s important to take time out to observe things and maybe get a completely new outlook on something.” Lisa is passionate, saying, “I don’t like the fact that drawing has been sidelined for reading, writing and arithmetic in schools. Years ago the note books for writing stories were half lined and half blank. Just as much was given over to drawing by animating your written story.”
In it’s eighth year, the Campaign for Drawing takes its mission from visionary Victorian artist and writer, John Ruskin, whose aim was not to teach people to draw, but how to see. The Campaign’s website states, “Each Big Draw season reveals how drawing opens our eyes to our environment and our heritage, encouraging us to think, invent and communicate.”
The Covent Garden Big Draw takes place on 13 & 14 October to mark Big Draw Day (13th) as part of the October-strong nation-wide of events. Check out the Cartooning Marquee, where you can work with professional illustrators and comic strip artists. On the Sunday there’s also a 2-hour Battle of the Cartoonists, between teams representing The Guardian, The Independent, and Private Eye.
The Drawing Inspiration Awards reward organisers who use The Big Draw to experiment, and to find activities that bring in new audiences and make connections with their collections, settings or wider communities. From the Campaign for Drawing website, the easiest way to find Big Draw events is to search for event in your area.
There are also 44 international Big Draw events this year, and 4 internet events.
With grants from Arts Council England and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, this season the Campaign will launch a Professional Development Programme. You can register your interest by emailing Lisa, with your full contact details including your job title, with ‘CPD Registration’ in the Subject line.
