Talks, Workshops and Consulting- Our Experiences and Future Offerings
Way back in 2020, after doing our first ever workshops at Loughborough University, we felt a mixed response. Doing an ‘illustration’ workshop was hard to formulate as the way people draw is similar to the way they write, it's completely unique to their hand. We enjoyed sharing the practice of illustration with others and leading the workshop but the format wasn’t quite right…
Since then we have given many types of talks, workshops and mentoring, here's a few examples and our thoughts on each.
’Our Story and Lessons Learnt’ Talks
This is most relevant to University students and those wanting to start up their own creative business. Keeping things realistic, we go through the ups and downs when growing Pickle and share some important lessons we learnt along the way. This talk keeps on evolving, but so does Pickle, and it’s always nice to reflect and share.
Speaking at LCB Depot Leicester
How to Design a Mural Workshop
We worked alongside the wonderful University of Hertfordshire to deliver a workshop to their second year students. It ran alongside a live brief, a competition to create a design for hoarding on campus. Taking a full day, we led the students through warm up activities, various tasks on creating dynamic compositions, considering colour and visualising abstract concepts.
We would love to do more of these in depth workshops where we can guide students through an activity and encourage feedback from peers. It’s so incredibly important to get feedback and we feel lucky we are a duo for this purpose. Any universities (or anyone!) who is interested can get in touch with us via email pickleillustration@gmail.com
Workshop at The University of Hertfordshire
Community Engagement Workshop
When designing public artworks we often work alongside a community group to get input on art going in their locality. This can be done in many ways and often the simpler the better.
Our best experience of community engagement was having conversations with the public DURING the painting of Utility Boxes in Solihull. We were on the high street and had several enlightening conversations with residents who really took to the project as they saw it being brought to life. This level of ‘display’ isn’t always possible but it does show how simple on street conversation (often with those who wouldn’t attend a workshop) can be more enlightening than a planned, ticketed and often feeling forced event.
Moving on from this, what we believe is effective when engaging with the community is finding methods to get the THOUGHTS and WORDS from a group. Although fun and creative, this isn’t usually achieved by doing drawing activities. We find we get the most rich information from smaller conversations and engaging word based activities. On a project with the RSC, we worked with a spoken word poet, Kurly, and a group of young carers. They made poems and shared their experiences, giving us imagery to translate into illustration work.
Ultimately communities want to feel they have a hand in an art project, no matter how big or small. Depending on the group, this can appear in different forms and it’s super useful for us to decide with the client what is best for the project and the group.
Interacting with the public on the streets of Shirley painting Utility Boxes
Mentoring and Coaching
We have dabbled in mentoring and coaching having completed the Staffordshire University Create Place Leadership Programme in 2022 and been mentors on The Arena’s mentorship programme for multiple years. We are more than happy to explore this further in the future as we build up experience. It would also be great to at some point take on interns to grow Pickle.
In conclusion…
We want to do more! With all the experience we have gathered we are able to effectively consult, talk and workshop more, to help clients get the most out of community art and for students to get their creative businesses into motion. If you know of or have an opportunity in mind let us know by filling out the form below…