SKETCHUARY CHALLENGE
Have you ever struggled to get your creativity going again after Christmas? Do you suffer from post-exhibition malaise?
In January our members were feeling a bit lacking in inspiration. As a group we had been extremely busy in October and November staging two exhibitions in quick succession and were now feeling listless after Christmas.
Luckily for us our social media guru, Rosaline Darby, came up with a great solution to kickstart our new year creativity and create content for our social media posts at the same time.
Her idea of setting a seven-week challenge during January and February certainly did the job for us. Each week a new ‘Prompt’ was posted on the Phoenix Instagram account, and we had a week to share our creative responses to it using the hashtag “sketchuary”.
The idea was to produce intuitive, spontaneous responses to the prompts without over-thinking them. Although it was called #sketchuary, these did not have to be conventional drawings and could be in any medium, or even an existing piece of work that suited the week’s theme if we didn’t have time to create something new. We could stitch, print, create mixed media art, or share a photograph of something we felt fitted the title.
We also invited other people to join in with us on Instagram and this was well-received, prompting several interesting and stimulating conversations.
Here are some images of our responses to the weekly prompts.
TEXTURE/TACTILE
Kate Davis
Rosaline Darby
Joan Glasgow
CIRCLES and SQUARES
Kate Davis
Rosaline Darby
Joan Glasgow
REFLECTING
Maria Walker
Robertta McPherson
COLOUR
Linda Walsh
Maria Walker
HIDDEN
Kate Davis
Rosaline Darby
LINES and LAYERS
Jo Coombes
SIGNS OF SPRING
Robertta McPherson
Jo Coombes
We all found the challenge was a great way to kickstart our creativity as well as a good device to explore a theme as a group; it is something we will certainly do again.