There's a worm at the bottom of the garden...

During Summer of last year, we were approached by the National Wildflower Centre to create some exhibition boards for their wormery barn. This project was part funded by Arts Council of England ACE and the National Wildflower Centre.

Here at Halewood Arts Association we like to get the Junior Artists Club involved in as much as possible and wanted to include them in the whole design process. There where to be three exhibition boards, with a different theme for each one, worms, the soil web of life and recycling. We began by running some workshops with the JAC along these themes and asked them to come up with some drawings we could include within the designs. The JAC never fail to dissapoint and came up with some brilliant designs.

Armed with our designs, we spent a week down at the National Wildflower Centre working on the boards there. It was lovely to create the work in the space and have the public give us feedback along the way.

Sophie still has nightmares of Carole repeatedly singing "There is a worm at the bottom of the garden, and his name is wiggly woo" but the final outcome of the boards, makes the nightmares worth while.

Do you like them? If you have visited the National Wildflower Centre, we would love to know what you think.

New Hutte St Georges Family Fun Day!

This week we where invited to work at the New Hutte St Georges Family Fun Day. It was a brilliant community event with a lot to get involved in, there was a climbing wall, Easter Egg hunt, live bands, fancy dress competition, performances from a local majorette troupe and of course we were on hand to provide arts and crafts. One of the things we decided to create was a mural, that visitors could all work on together and give the New Hutte community centre something to keep after we had finished. We have created Murals before (you can read all about the Big Draw Mural we created here) and thought it would work really well on the day.

We began by gridding out the image we wanted to create
and redrawing it out on the large piece of paper.

Darren the ranger even had a go at drawing some of mural out.. 

Can you tell what it is yet?

Sophie filling out some of the detail

Carole giving the dragon some finishing touches

Once the mural was complete, we could take it down to the fun day to be filled in by the visitors.

We added panels onto the drawing to give a stained glass window effect

Sophie, Cousie and Carole of Halewood Arts with the final image.

Thankfully the weather held out and we didn't have any rain to spoil the day. We loved the final outcome and it was great to provide something the whole community could work on together. We also ran an arts and crafts stall, allowing the visitors to create their own St Georges Day dragons, Easter Eggs, Origami Flowers and Boxes. It was lovely to see so many of the children chasing their parents around with dragons on sticks.

If you came along to the event thanks for making the Mural look so wonderful and hopefully you will see it displayed within the New Hutte Community Centre. Thanks for taking the time to read this post and keep checking back for updates about what we are up to.