Illustration Society

 When looking through my draw of art supplied I found a  box of split pins that I had used to make a pop-up book in college. I thought that I could use these for Society by running a workshop on making puppets.  Making puppets would be a fun way to break out of the sketchbook and create their characters as a 3D object (?) (they would also be animatable) I also knew that most of the people in the society have there own OCs (Original Characters) and they would enjoy making them into puppets. It was quite an easy session to run and prepare for because all that was needed was scissors, split pins and a slightly thick card. I also made an example to show everyone.  It was really fun and we could use the puppets to make animations or put them on sticks for a puppet show. We even considered making a small cardboard stage but didn't have enough time. 

 For one of the sessions we created a workshop in which everyone would get a completely different (and randomized) comic layout page. But everyone would have the same story prompt. That way people would have to be creative with how they use the boxes (and amount of boxes) they were given.  We thought of the prompts 'Finding Something in a Forest' and 'An Alien Encounter'. These are quite broad so people could have fun and make them bizarre. Everyone seemed to like this task and there were some amazing outcomes. 

 We were able to get the opportunity to run an illustration shop in the Eldon Building Foyer. After the success of the last grad show shop the lecturers thought it'd be a good idea to run a shop at another point in the year and they ask me and Helena if we would want to have half of the table be for the Illustration Society as we had made so many zines and products (badges, stickers and bookmarks). And of course we said yes, so we spent a lot of our time preparing the stock for the shop. Deciding prices (getting a lot of help from tutors), making more things and counting everything up, as well as preparing our own individual stock for the other part of the shop. Which, would be for all of the students on the Illustration course. Adam and Phoebe were enlisted to help run the shop with us as they were equally as enthusiastic about it. And when it came to the day we seemed to be the dream team!  It was an amazing experience to basically run this shop all by ourselves. We had to s...

 24/10/2025 What The Blob? Zine We were really stumped for ideas what to do with the blobs from the workshop. Actually we had a lot of ideas but didn't think any were very solid, so we decided to do another zine (if in doubt zine it out). We thought that we'd separate the photocopied blobs and the member made A4 blobs, and make a poster and a zine. But the poster ended up turning into stickers which we were WAY happier with.  For the zine we had found a template for a fold zine that could have a pocket in the middle, so we HAD to try that. So we threw it together in photoshop and decided to print it on a slightly thicker cream coloured paper, because the stark white made it look a bit tacky. Then we made bookmarks that we could fit in the zine pocket (yay!), which we made with the idea of it being a 'fill in your own blobs' kind of thing. We also recycled the pattern we'd made for the colouring book zine and put that on the back of the bookmarks. In the end we went ...

 17/10/2025 BLOBS For this session we had prepared some photocopies of colourful blobs that people could then draw onto, and basically draw what they see. Like when you see a cloud and think it's shaped like a hat or something.  We then had everyone fill an A4 with blobs and pass that onto the next person, they would then draw on the blobs, again drawing what they see. I think this is a great way to be creative and really throw anything at the page. 

 16/10/2025 Colouring Book Zine After the illustration tennis session, one of our first thoughts for making a zine was a colouring book. The line-art that was created was perfect for colouring in sections, and we'd also be hitting a different target audience for it.  So first we had to count how many pages we had and make a little mock-up booklet so we could understand the layout. And it turned out that for the number of pages we had we'd need to make some patterned pages for behind the front and back cover. Helen created the front cover using the illustration society poster as inspiration (as well as the society's cat mascot), they used dip pen and ink and coloured some bits in pencil to get the colouring book idea across. For the pattern we used oil pastels/chalk to do wobbly lines that overlapped and coloured in part of it to again solidify the colouring book aesthetic.  We decided to make it all black and white, to save on cost, and then we'd have coloured p...