Let Rip at Sir John Soane's Museum

Yesterday I made one of my regular pilgrimmages to what is possibly my favourite place in London - Sir John Soane's Museum. It's filled with objects of curiosity and reminds me of my Grandad. This time I went with a purpose beyond just wandering around the place imagining it was my house. I went and took part in a free workshop called 'Let Rip', held as part of the Big Draw event.

We made a motley crew of 11 of all different nationalities, ages, and levels of drawing ability (i.e. from 'I can't draw really' to 'I'm an artist and lecture in art college'). We first spent an hour drawing an object that caught our fancy from inside the museum with the condition being we had to choose something with lots of light and dark contrasts within it. Armed with lots of B pencils we were encouraged to keep shading and shading till our drawings near sprung out of the paper.

Back in the workshop our teacher laid out vast quantities of painted paper and this we used to make collages based on our drawings. A lovely silence descended on the room for the next few hours as we busily concentrated on ripping up bits of coloured paper and gluing them into position carefully. Sticky fingers and cups of tea and contented smiles on everyones faces.

The collages started off looking horrible but after much encouragement and comments like 'it's coming together' from our teacher, they really did start to take shape and by 4pm we all had two pictures, one drawn and one stuck together, that we were rather proud of.

Sir John Soane's museum does other events for adults and for kids and families, you can find details of them here: http://www.soaneeducation.org.uk/home/index.cfm?CFID=1739361&CFTOKEN=51516954

P.S. A great British artist called Mary Delany pioneered this process and created pictures of flowers that appeared to be paintings unless you looked very closely. See her work at the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/m/mary_delany,_physalis,_winter.aspx