Where do you source ideas for your textiles? Do you use a sketchbook or workbook? What is a sketchbook for?

Sketchbooks can help you develop your unique creative voice and help you stay in flow. They are a space to explore, to discover and to play.

Helen Hallows will be leading a mixed-media workshop encouraging a focus on process and play. Helen creates exploratory sketchbooks that are fuelled by curiosity and playfulness. She will guide you through a series of simple drawing tasks based on a table of nature finds. You will be guided to embrace process over outcome whilst you explore shape, line and pattern. Working with a simple palette and some direct drawing and mark-making techniques you can start to simplify, play and combine elements to begin to develop a mark making repertoire that, when layered with shape and colour gives you a starting point for textiles work that is unique to you and your own skills and experiences. Helen is an encouraging tutor who believes there is no such thing as a creative mistake and will get you making bolder more confident marks and pages full of excitement!

Over the two days you will shape a sketchbook that is personal to you that is inspired from primary sources – objects and ephemera gathered from nature. You will be shown how to loosen your line and challenge yourself with composition, placement and scale. You will incorporate print techniques into your pages with monoprint and make simple block prints. You will learn to create flow in a sketchbook, building ideas from one page to the next and learning to embrace ‘mistakes’ and not let them become creative block.

The course is designed to encourage you to work from primary sources and to unlock your potential to make work that is unique to you, that relies on your intuition and builds your confidence. It doesn’t expect a level of drawing accomplishment and the drawings you make will be process based and not finished pieces. You will be encouraged to overcome hesitation and trust yourself to build mark, line, shape and colour to create a lively sketchbook of potential that you can edit ideas from and return to again and again for inspiration.

Helen will also be running a workshop called ‘Mark and Stitch’ where you can build the ideas from your sketchbook onto cloth and embellish with stitch.

Art materials

There will be a £7.50 material fee for this workshop. This will be a kit including a sketchbook and mark making materials for you to keep.