I don’t get asked to draw outside very often. Last weekend was different. I was working at the Kent County Show. I didn’t know what to expect before I arrived, only that I’d be working on blackboards and whiteboards. I imagined them to be separate, but as you can see from the picture they were an interesting combination of the two. I soon found out that I was drawing in the Skanska show garden. The garden was designed by Learning through Landscapes and built by Skanska RM and designed to encourage children to learn outside. There were storytellers and people making a clay oven and a very popular set of scales which used bricks to calculate weight. I was there to encourage children to draw on the blackboard. I really love the Sonic the Hedgehog, seen in the photo. I also listened to the storytellers and transcribed some of their tales into pictures. I really liked it when the children picked up on what I was doing and finished off some of the stories themselves. The Garden won ‘Top Gold’ at the show. Hurrah!

I didn’t have the opportunity to post this at the time it was made, but I am proud of the work that Mark Calderbank  (Reason design) and myself put into Damian Hughes’s new book, “The Liquid Thinking Survival Guide to Change.” Damian is a fantastic speaker and I always enjoy working with him. This book is the fourth one we have collaborated on and is the first one to be in full colour and packed with illustrations. I always learn something when I read Damian’s books and he always loads the text with highly visual examples, which are a joy to illustrate. I particuarly enjoyed trying to capture the likenesses of some of the people Damian cited. Here’s a few examples.

I love working with Audiences South! Here’s some Scribing from the NI11 session they ran in Wokingham. Wokingham is another local authority which have adopted the NI11 (arts engagement) as a priority. This session entailed looking at different segmentation within audiences to develop possible new ways for engagement in the arts.

Wow, this seems like I am catching up with a lot of stuff. I am working my way back to post some work from May and June. I seem to have done a load of stuff since then!

NI11 is the national indicator to ensure engagement in the arts. I was shocked to find out that reading a book is not a cultural activity, but reading a book within a book club is. Kareoke is also a cultural activity. By that rationale, being in a band must be? It seems they have it in for the solo artist!

At the beginning of June I helped design and capture the Jam Packed session for KCC. They are one of four local authorities in the South to take on NI11 (engagement of the arts) as one it’s priorities.

As part of the session which was titled ‘Jam Packed’ a game of ‘Jamopoly’ was run and teams of Kent based arts organisations brainstormed initiatives and events to attract more visitors and engagement in the arts. The theme took it’s cues from the Monopoly board and that made it’s way into the Scribing.

On the 21st May, I was fortunate enough to be invited by the RSA to cover a really interesting lecture by Robert Shiller, the renowned economist. His dicussion with Daniel Finkelstein from The Times  was about Shiller’s new book ‘Animal Spirits’. It was a really good discussion. I was there with an A3 pad taking notes and from those notes I created the Visual Synthesis above. The finished Visual Article is published in the current issue of the RSA Journal (Summer 2009) Here’s some details.