When the Owliens invaded Woking...
Tags: Tablet art, Tesco, Hudl, Lightbox, Woking, LetsHudl, Owliens
Date: 16 December 2013 15:04:58
For the past few months I've been rushing from one job to another, which has been busy and occasionally stressful but utterly lovely throughout. The culmination was everything that the weeks weren't but not in any sort of a bad way at all.
Confusing? When is anything that I ever do not?
The initial brief was to spend 10 weeks teaching young people to draw on tablets. At the time I didn't have a fleet of tablets to my name so that was the first problem to solve. The Tesco Hudl came up in the media and was launched a week before the first session started so that seemed the answer to that question (and so it was - the tablets have all performed brilliantly, the negative being that I could only afford to buy 7 and had a class bigger than that so a lot of creativity was made throughout to make each session run smoothly).
Anyhow: ten weeks of drawing on tablets? What could we do to fill that amount of time with 8 - 10 year olds?
In the end I cheated a little, but with a very specific purpose. In addition to the tablet artwork time we also had three weeks of shrink plastic artwork (because of what came last and also I know it's something that just always goes down well).
On the tablet side we drew pictures in Photoshop Touch and Sketchbook Pro, created panorama images (a little cheatily again as I couldn't find a suitable app on Android so we used the excellent Autostitch on iPad) and face mangled pictures in a range of apps on Hudl including Liquidroid, Cymera and Photo Warp +.
And then, when it was week 9, I made a mini book diary/story of all the things we had done as detailed below.
The printed pages.
The pages folded into the component parts, numbered so I knew which ones to stick where...
Venues swapped the sticking process began...
All books stuck together...
A tower of mini books :)
Another view of the book tower :) With a mix of artwork - tablet drawn robots and liquified faces...
The handheld library.
... and numbered just for the fun of it. I had the kids pick their book out of a hat so that they all received a random number.
And finally we had the last hurrah of the shrink plastic. Each young person created a front and back cover for their books:
The front covers.
The back covers :)
The last one I could picture... By this time the parents were waiting to come in and pick up their kids and the artwork to take home with them.
All in all it was a thoroughly lovely time in a brilliant venue (the Lightbox in Woking). More to come, I think, but this series was a lovely one to be a part of.