The Craft Project Week 1: My Summer

We’re launching a new Craft Project on Thursday 27 August with Diana Ching who will set a series of creative projects every Thursday on our website and social media to give you ideas of things you can work on at home to build your own piece of art over a period of weeks.

This week you are going to create a kind of mood board using drawing, collage and text… just a sheet of paper onto which you stick cuttings from magazines, garden catalogues, etc; small, simple drawings of objects that say summer to you (flowers, plants, barbecues, ice cream) and lines of text that speak to you (anything – could be excerpts of poetry or just random words). The materials used in this would be minimal – hopefully everyone has a sheet of paper (ideally A4 size or larger), old magazines, pencils or some kind of colouring materials – and the theme of “summer” is broad enough to enable everyone to personalise their work and give it more meaning.

Here are some instructions to guide you:

1. Start with one or two magazine “summery” images – not too big. Cut or tear them and stick them onto your sheet of paper as randomly as you like.
2. Add a few simple drawings – could be items in the cuttings or from elsewhere, or from your head – again randomly around the page.
3. Add a few words of text here and there, or a line of poetry, or words from a current news headline maybe.
4. If you have colouring materials you could add some colour swatches (or cut coloured shapes from magazines).

Download these instructions in PDF mode for printing.

Take your time doing this – you may not do it all at once, it may be better to leave the piece of paper you’re working on somewhere you can see it… you’ll find that ideas come to you out of the blue and you can add to your “mood board” over the course of the week.

What you’re doing effectively is producing a kind of mixed media journal page – a page that will reflect what you’re thinking and feeling about the summer of 2020. It’s been a hot one so far so I won’t be surprised if the work we see reflects that… perhaps lots of red, orange and yellow; images of glorious gardens; maybe something specific to the pandemic; possibly some angry-sounding news headlines!

There’s no right or wrong way of doing this – the process and the end result will be very personal. This isn’t really  art journal project in the future – unless you want it to be – but it will provide a starting point to get the ball rolling.

You can if you wish (and I hope many of you will) send MFT or post pictures of your work as a reply to the social media posts and also comments about what you’d like to do in future (eg improve your drawing, learn about composition) and at the end of the week, I hope to be able to get enough feedback to set a new topic for next week. You can email them to info@maryfrancestrust.org.uk – (use the heading ‘The Craft Project’). Please let us know if it’s ok to share on our social media and website.

So that’s it – we’re creating a page of work on the theme of “My Summer” using collage, drawing and text. Please don’t feel under pressure to produce something perfect… this is really a warm-up exercise, a way to start being creative and encourage a creative habit. Let’s see what you can do!

Diana

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