Bringing Creativity into the Classroom

Published on 10.05.16

Second year BA (Hons) Illustration Student Sarah Dean has developed an amazing self-initiated project as part of the curent module Competition and Commissioning. Sarah is passionate about engaging young people with creativity and choose to involve children from her local primary schools with a conservation project. Children from Much Birch Primary School took part in

Second year BA (Hons) Illustration Student Sarah Dean has developed an amazing self-initiated project as part of the curent module Competition and Commissioning.

Sarah is passionate about engaging young people with creativity and choose to involve children from her local primary schools with a conservation project. Children from Much Birch Primary School took part in a logo competiton to create a winning logo for the Ross-on-Wye Hedgehog Festival.

As well as encouraging puplis to create competition entries she invloved them in a screen printing workshop to produce bags with the winning design. The young participants took home thier printed bag and a rubber hedghog stamp to remind them of the project and reinforce ideas of nature conservation.

The approach that Sarah has taken has not only involved the College but also local organisations and businesses enabling her to pull in financial support and publicity to develop the project.
Sarah is Young Arts Representative for the Ross-on-Wye Decorative and Fine Arts Society, the society supported Sarah’s idea by covering the costs of lazer cutting to create rubber stamps for each participating child to take home.

HCA Tutors and Technical Demostrators helped Sarah to develop skills in lazer cutting and screen printing and the IT department supported her in preparing the winning image for publicity.

Competiton winner is Yr 3 pupil Dylan Curtis (above) whose design is used as part of the festival’s branding. Dylan explained to Sarah how this experience has made a difference “Before I did this, I didnt think I was very good at drawing – now I think I could be famous!”
Sarah now has a series of workshops planned with other local primary schools starting in the autumn term.