Graeme Reed Workshop 25th June 2011



Jenny's Ice Hockey Player



Creating Crowds

Watching the game

Toni in creative mode

An excellent workshop today with Graeme Reed, an Ashbourne based artist/illustrator.

An extract from the Kickstart book suggested crowds:

 “Lots of people! What a daunting thought.

… skiing … felt as if the slopes were crowded with skiers all rushing at me. To capture this feeling I traced a line diagram from a ‘How To’ book. I then drew it again and again until the page was full of overlapping figures. 

The drawing could be worked on to make it more abstract. The figures could be coloured in the bright colours that skiers wear. The outline could be quilted. The figures could be drawn in much more detail.

If you imagine an aerial shot of The Great North Run crossing one of the bridges over the Tyne, all you can see are the heads and shoulders with only the figures at the front and sides having bodies and legs. This is true for lots of crowd shots.”

Graeme identified ways of interpreting crowd scenes; he was generous with both his ideas and his resources,.

We started with quick warm up drawing exercises using photographs of crowd scenes (and imagination); we created line drawings to try and capture the mood of the crowd, continuous line and blind continuous line drawings, using pen and pencil.

Graeme then introduced mono printing techniques and various coloured inks; throughout the day we worked with 4 versions:

Line drawn, Stencilling with vectorgraphic images, Wiping to create dark and light, and Painterly mono prints introducing more colour.

Some images were more abstract and created the ‘feel’ of the crowd, some were clearer and representational; quality of mark and line, colour shape and tone were all employed differently to produce an array of images to move on into stitch.

Comments from the feedback forms:

"a thoroughly good lesson!"

"Wonderful  Tutor"

"Really inspiring workshop  thank you"

"really enjoyed the workshop, could have happily carried on for much longer" 

Thank you Graeme for a brilliant day!