Earlier this year went to a sketchbook workshop with Shelley Burgoyne. Had previously been on a print workshop, but this was about pushing ideas in your sketchbook. It was excellent and full of great new ways of working and help to move work forward. We took items that interested us to draw and develop. Amongst other things I took a rabbit skull.

Excercises included using various articles in the studio to create backgrounds and then drawing or creating images over the top. The backgrounds might be printed from bubble wrap, or painted in ink.

Drawing with backgrounds

We looked at drawing and line using concertina books and making the drawings quickly, moving to the next page, a bit like warm up drawings in life drawing

Line drawing concertina book

We then had to take parts of our drawings and create a collage in cut paper, cutting directly with scissors and pasting onto a large sheet of paper. When this was dry we selected areas and cut out pieces we found interesting. We were encouraged to use these then to create further pieces of work.

Collage

Collage

I really liked some of the shapes this produced and used the one above which was inspired by the shape of an eye socket in my skull.

Backgrounds and shapes

We got a lot done in a day and it filled me with ideas and helped me look at things in a new way, also great fun to work in a way that is not about a finished piece of work.