The Big Book Draw.

Categories: artwork, books, and-another-thing

Tags: brush play, Guildford Book Festival, Brushes

Date: 14 July 2009 08:06:01

Long time readers (hi mum and Ian) may remember that one of my favourite times of the year is the Big Book Draw. It's a collaborative piece between the Guildford Book Festival and the Big Draw led, organised and planned out by myself and my wife.

For the first three years we truly did the Biggest Book of the Festival as hundreds of people collaborated on huge pages that detailed the adventures of the Dragon and his Princess. Then, last year, we went small.

The reasons were twofold. One: kids and adults who participated didn't really have the chance to take anything home, apart from the fun of their participation, whereas with mini-books they did. The second reason was that the third big book was so big and heavy - due to so many people participating - that I did my back in carrying it. Something had to go and the year after I was determined it wouldn't be my back again.

TBH I have mixed feelings about this: the big book was wonderful, luxurious, inspiring. MIni-books are fabulous but there was something about scale. I love the sight of 50 huge coloured canvasses at the start of a Big Draw knowing that they would all be filled in by amazing pictures and the sight of kids sitting with parents and grandparents all getting arty and chatting ideas was and is the most amazing memory. Mini-books last year was a fab day - loads of fun for the same reasons... I just miss the option of running both I guess. I'd love to have the time and energy (and team) to do the two together or back to back. Hey ho. I'm lucky to have had the chance to do the first three. It's a huge amount of work but the memories are well worth it.

So: Mini-books again this year and it's our fifth one. In my bonce I had an idea that I would love to follow through on but seems less feasible by the day. I though that we could get a number of well known authors, writers, artists, actors, anyone really to doodle a couple of fish each. The kids (and adults) would then be given sheets of fish that they could trace, colour or stick into their own books and say they'd created a collaborative work. Seemed like a lovely idea yet, again, emails, letters, tweets, comments and similar find no responses. We'll see. I reckon if one or two people come onboard then others may follow and we do have until October to get this sorted. The beginning part is always the hardest slog and, if you've read page 5 of this weeks Surrey Advertiser you might understand why I'm somewhat sidetracked at the moment.

When people get to the BBD day we tell them the start of the story and the end and allow people to fill in the gaps. Last year the theme revolved around the Dragon, his Princess and the Ant's Library (mini-books y'see :) ).

This year the tale revolves around a fish who is sad he has no books to read. The start of the tail ( :) ) sees the Princess asking the fish what's wrong and then determined to find a solution. The end, the page below, has the solution but, in between, she and the fish could travel the world, read messages in bottles, look at treasure maps, go for a walk with the fish in a tank on wheels, all sorts of all sorts. That parts not up to me, it's up to the crowd. We'll see how the story progresses on October the 17th.

[caption id="attachment_1019" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="The Dragon, his Princess and the Fish :)"]The Dragon, his Princess and the Fish :)[/caption]

((Incidentally I do have the brushes movie file to upload to show the making of the image. I did so much playing about with it that it clocked in at 6 minutes or so which is by far the longest brushes movie I'd exported so far and shows how many niggly changes I made to the image while I was painting it... Will upload that soon, trying to work out a vocal track atm)).

Edit: That sounds maudlin. Not so, I'm looking forward to mini-books in a big way :) Just a shame I can't clone myself to do both days!