The Big Draw and the Big Drawing Book Review

This post highlights information about The Big Draw and announces the Big Drawing Book Review.

Every year in October, in the UK, we have The Big Draw - initiated and co-ordinated by the Campaign for Drawing. The eighth Big Draw launches on 30th September and then runs from 1-31 st October with a special focus on Saturday 13th October. With just over a month to go, I thought it would be timely to highlight the planned events around the UK and the scope for people to join in. You also have time to register an event.

The Big Draw, the Campaign's annual October showpiece, proves that drawing can be a public activity as well as a private passion. 1000 venues across the UK, from great national institutions to village halls, regularly join in to offer people of all ages the chance to discover that drawing is enjoyable, liberating and at everyone's fingertips....
Campaign for Drawing - The Big Draw

On 30th September, the National Launch of the Big Draw will commence with Big Draw East which is being hosted at venues near where I live in East London. The launch events taking place on 30th September are many and various - click here to see the full list and some outline details. Further details are available from the events listing on the Big Draw Database.

The themes are: Shape the Future - Designing for Sustainability (in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering); Changing Cities; Inside/Out; Body Science/Body Culture; and Drawing Differently.

For the month before the launch, children, students and adults will have opportunities to work with artists, designers, scientists and architects from the area, well known for its high density of art and design studios. Together with a team of celebrity 'drawers', these practitioners will lead workshops and other activities to ensure a lasting legacy of collective creative achievement.

Further Information

Every October, galleries, museums, science centres, heritage and environmental sites, libraries, archives, community and shopping centres, colleges, schools and art clubs host drawing activities for all abilities. They explore technical, scientific, architectural, archaeological or fine art drawing.

Participants of all ages are invited to help expand the definitions and uses of drawing - experimenting with pencils, crayons, charcoal, sand, clay, digital imagery, choreographed movement, vapour trails and fire drawings.
Big Draw website

Any visual art event taking place in October can be registered as part of the Big Draw programme. Organisers, click here for more information on registering, funding advice etc.

Would-be participants ahould keep visiting www.thebigdraw.org for events in your area (more are added each day to the "Event Search" - see left hand column of the website page - this organises information in geographic areas and lists all events).

I'd suggest that anybody who teaches drawing takes a look at the Database as it is full of innovative ideas for how to stimulate drawing.

What I'm interested in

I've got my eye on a number of events in London and the East End which are linked to the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art. (which is the fine art department of the University of Oxford). These are:

• 30th September (12 noon - 1pm) Sarah Simblet, author of Dorling & Kindersley's The Drawing Book and lecturer in drawing and anatomy at the Ruskin School of Drawing and the Royal College of Art, talks about aspects of drawing practice. Draper's Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary's College Mile End Road, London, Tower Hamlets, E1 4NS
• a series of 45 minute lunchtime talks in the Sainsbury Wing of The National Gallery on every Wednesday during October
  
• 3rd October - Artist and author Sarah Simblet considers observed details to be the vocabulary of her drawings, while imagination is their grammar.
• 10th October - Michael Archer discusses the seductive conversation between looking and touching in the art of drawing.
  
• 17th October - Artist Deanna Petherbridge, Research Professor in Drawing at the University of Lincoln, examines the links and disconnections between preliminary drawings made for historical paintings and contemporary practice.
• 24th October - Stephen Farthing, Rootstein Hopkins Professor of Drawing at the University of the Arts, London, explores degrees of accuracy within drawings made as records.
• 31st October - Satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe looks back at his long and varied career, and demonstrates making a drawing from the first mark on a blank page.

The Big Drawing Book Review

I'm pleased to announce that I will be reviewing books about Drawing on this blog during the month of October . I possess a rather large number books about drawing and am now being asked to review drawing books. I've been wanting to find a way of reviewing them in a systematic way. The notion of a month devoted to drawing in October seems like an excellent prompt for me to get focused and complete a number of book reviews.

If people would like to join in with The Big Drawing Book Review, just let me know if you're interested by leaving a comment below and I'll be in touch about it before October. It would also be very helpful to know if people would like any tips about doing book reviews.

I'll do a blog post at the end of October which will list all books reviewed and the associated links to all the completed book reviews on all the participating blogs - and I'll then feature it in the right hand column of this blog and list it on my squidoo lens about Drawing and Sketching.

Links:

• Campaign for Drawing
• The Big Draw - database and events listing
• The Big Draw 2006 - record of events
  
• Big Draw East - national launch
  
• Drawing and Sketching - Resources for Artists