The Big Draw Festival 2021: Make the Change was another roaring success for Big Draw Organisers across the globe, bringing people - young and old - back to the drawing board for another year! Now that most of our Festival organisers are kicking their feet up and reflecting over their events' successes, we wanted to catch up with a few of our Sponsor Partners to hear all about what they got up to...

The University of Lincoln ran an 'off campus' event with students from Thomas Cowley High School, Spalding Grammar School, Branston Community Academy, and Lincoln College Newark. Students recycled Pringles Tubes to make camera obscuras, using mobile phones to photograph the images and reinterpreting the resulting images as drawings. We were lucky enough to steal a few moments with Brian Voce, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln’s College of Arts, to find out more about their ‘Pinhole Pictures’ event, as well as his opinion on the importance of drawing, visual literacy and more!

Interview: Matilda Barratt in conversation with Brian Voce.

Could you start by telling us a little bit about the University of Lincoln, its history and your work there?

I’m a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design where I am responsible for leading Year 2 BA (Hons) Graphics. I’m also involved with our outreach programme and help with workshops for schools and their visits to us here in the School Design. I also lead the Visual Expression Module for Year Two on the course. This module is very much about developing creative thinking skills, being brave in your creativity, and exploring a diverse range of approaches to solving visual communication problems and most importantly using drawing to explore ideas.  

Before I worked at the university, I was involved in Further Education, Community Arts, Schools Workshops, and Offender Learning. In all these situations drawing played a key role in my approach to teaching art and design, forming the foundation from which students could progress.  

In its current form with its ‘new’ main campus here in Lincoln the University is relatively young going back to October 2001 when the Brayford Campus was built. Originally part of a group of institutions forming Humberside College of Higher Education, in 1992 it became a full university as the University of Humberside. The university was renamed the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside in January 1996. (Her Majesty the Queen opened the first University of Lincoln building on the Brayford Campus in 1996). However, its roots are rather deeper than that and in the School of Design we can trace our origins back to 1861 and the Hull School of Art. (The University also acquired The Lincoln School of Art and Design in 2001, which dates back to 1863).  We have a long history with involvement in the creative arts!

We use the term ‘visual literacy’ a lot - regarding its relevance across a breadth of different subjects and professions as well as its vital role in day-to-day life. I’m interested to know what it means to you?

I think Visual Literacy, like any form of language, develops and evolves the more we use it and explore the boundaries of what is possible to communicate through drawing. Drawing is a fundamental human activity, innate to even the youngest children, very young children across the Globe creating similar drawings regardless of their many diverse cultural backgrounds. As such it’s a universal language, and perhaps even the very first form of human communication. One might even speculate that before we could communicate through an agreed spoken language we could communicate through drawing. This ability of drawing to transcend spoken language and culture makes it an extremely effective communication tool which we all respond to.  However, in order to communicate effectively everyone needs to be able to interpret and decode the marks that create drawings and agree on their meaning. I guess this is where developing a sophisticated visual literacy is so important. For example, when learning to draw many students judge their success by how realistic (essentially like a photograph) their drawings are. As they progress with their drawing the ability to communicate the unseen becomes important, for example, emotion, mood, movement, and with portraiture a sitter’s personality. A photographic likeness simply won’t ‘cut it here’, something more is needed that transcends a facsimile of reality. Expressive mark making, choice of materials, viewpoint, and composition all play a part in communicating something more to the viewer.  It’s here that drawing can communicate so much more than words alone, the choice of line, the medium, colours, technique all these things contribute to our ‘reading’ of the work and influence how we respond.

And how did your Big Draw events respond to this year’s theme?

As our event took place off campus in local schools we took a very liberal interpretation of the brief and the theme ‘Make the Change’, and environmental sustainability because we wanted an activity that could be run by teachers in schools without needing access to specialist equipment or spaces. We took the decision to go with an activity run locally by teachers and supported by staff here at the university because last year Covid Lockdown Regulations forced us to cancel the events we had planned to run in our studios at the university, and looking ahead when we planned the event we didn’t want to find ourselves in the same situation again. 

So, we came up with the idea of recycling Pringles Tubes to make camera obscuras, using mobile phones to photograph the images, and then asking the pupils to reinterpret and explore the resulting rather fuzzy images as drawings. All the final images and drawings could then be sent to us via email for printing and exhibiting here at the university. 

In this way we reasoned our event could go ahead regardless of whatever the prevailing Covid situation was.

For your Big Draw events this year, you wanted to challenge the pupil’s perceptions of what drawing could be, and to encourage them to explore playful creative mark making. Why do you think a playful approach to drawing is important?

As I stated previously when beginning to draw the majority of people set themselves the goal of reproducing an accurate image of whatever their subject is. Whilst this is useful in terms of learning the basics of observation, control of media, line, tone, etc it can only take you so far on your creative journey. The results are often competent but somewhat unengaging drawings where technique triumphs over creativity. I guess you could liken it to learning to play an instrument, when learning to play the notes can again only take you so far in communicating to the audience, what makes you want to get up and dance isn’t the notes but how they’re interpreted and being played by the musician. It’s the same with drawing after learning the basics you need to take a more individual approach to find your own way of interpreting drawing. It’s here that taking an uninhibited and playful approach to mark making can help to ‘free up’ an individual’s approach, enable discovery of new techniques and the development of a distinctly individual drawing style.

Could you tell our readers any more about your #MaketheChange events this year? Were there any stand out moments for you?

Our event was titled ‘Pinhole Pictures’: The Big Draw at the University of Lincoln.  An exhibition of drawings inspired by images made with the camera obscura. 

This year students from Thomas Cowley High School, Spalding Grammar School, Branston Community Academy, and Lincoln College Newark participated in our event. 

We created an event for regional schools based around a ‘marriage’ of art and science. We supplied Camera Obscura lens kits and instructions to participating schools, their pupils then built the cameras from empty Pringles tubes. They could now explore what kind of image they could find with the cameras, and using their mobile phones, they photographed the resultant images and printed them out. (Not as easy as it sounds as everything is upside down and movement reversed when viewed through their Camera Obscuras) 

Our challenge to them was to then explore and reinterpret these images as drawings through any appropriate media. To be experimental and playful, to try stuff, and see what happens. 

Standout moments were the creativity shown by the students when exploring the kind of images they could make with their improvised camera obscuras. There were some really exciting approaches to making the initial photographs. It was great to see so much thought and care being taken to these firstimages. Other standout moments were the range of approaches taken to drawing and seeing how many students had really embraced the idea of exploring expressive mark making ranging from drawings in pastel on textured papers through to drawings made on acetates that were then layered up to make the final image. 

Finally, having taken part in The Big Draw Festival for several years now, do you have any words of wisdom for anyone considering taking part? More specifically, do you have any advice for running Big Draw events in schools?

My words of wisdom: Start planning early! I start thinking about October’s events in February/ March (as soon as the Big Draw theme for the year is announced). I’d say to anyone in Higher Education thinking about running a Big Draw Event (especially if you’re looking to involve schools), get a good team around you, as there’s a lot to organise. Check out the school timetables with your local authority and make sure you haven’t planned to run your Big Draw in the school half term, as responses from schools are likely to be low! Our event usually take place on campus but if you’re planning to run off campus events in schools then constant communication is key to success as ensuring the message gets through to the right member of staff is important and not always easy. A lot of my messages seem to never reach their intended recipients if sent as a general email to school admin. (I always telephone schools and ask for the names of staff running Art, and Design Technology departments, then email them directly). 

Finally, have fun. Don’t make it too serious (especially for younger kids). At Lincoln we want to enthuse and inspire children about the creative arts. For the older participants we hope they’ll take inspiration from the day and the many creative career possibilities open to them through Higher Education here at the University. 

Thank you, Brian!