In this resource, you will find 12 prompts that your students can use to generate some exciting drawings. Inspired by Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” to help get over a creative block, the prompts include methods that your students may have used before (such as continuous line drawing), but also others that I hope will be new and challenging for them. Each prompt has its own card with an example produced by myself or one of my students, and comes with a more detailed explanation which you can use to help you to deliver the session, or provide to the students if giving the task as independent work. I originally created these chance cards for my Level 3 Art Foundation group. The materials required are paper (or a sketchbook), fineliner, ink (or diluted coffee), a candle (or wax crayon) a brush, and some collage materials such as an old magazine or newspaper. Each tasks takes a different amount of time to complete, but I have got through all 12 in a 3 hour session. The prompts work well when repeated and combined. The prompts are general and can be applied to any theme, and can easily slot into your Scheme of Work. Alternatively, use as a one-off or cover session and invite your students to select a theme such as “Natural Forms”, “Kitchenalia” or “Through the Window”, before using the cards to develop their observational skills. If you have access to a printer, it’s nice to print the cards out and pop them in an envelope to be used again and again. I like to laminate a set for each of my students and give them as a bit of a gift, but they work just as well if you browse and select them from the screen and I have used them with several groups during remote learning. I hope you find this resource to be useful! Best wishes, Hannah

In this 3 page resource, your students will be introduced to mark making and the reasons that artists use mark making to enhance their work. In the first task, “a menu of marks”, your group will use non-traditional materials (such as diluted coffee in place of ink, and kitchen utensils as tools), to respond to 15 words that describe marks, such as “meandering” and “spontaneous”. A discussion about the kind of tools they may be able to access in their immediate environment has also been beneficial at this point. I have provided images of some of my own coffee mark making samples which you can use as a visual aid here. When delivering this task, I have encouraged my learners to consider the way they present their “menu” - they could fold their paper into squares, or allow each mark to run into the next. This is a nice, relaxed, sociable session and it’s fun to guess the tools that have been used if your learners are able to share images of their mark making in the group chat. In the second task, students will use mark making to draw an interior space in their home. This resource was originally created for Level 3 Art and Design students and easily filled a 2 hour session (don’t forget to allow time for gathering materials). In the session prior, you could invite your learners to bring in objects from home that they think could make good mark making tools. Pasta, old tooth brushes, sponges, plastic cutlery, pine cones an branches, that sort of thing. This also works really well as a remote session and has been tried and tested during lockdown! Easily emailed, fun and experimental, great participation. The task is also great for Textiles students and Graphics students, as a way to get them to think about backgrounds and layers that could be enhanced digitally. I hope you find this resource to be helpful! Best wishes Hannah

This printable PDF will help your students to gather relevant artist research as well as advising them of how to organise it within their sketchbook. The prompts encourage students to ask the right questions about the influences and media used in the artwork, as well as thinking about how they can apply their findings to their own work. I hope you find it to be useful.

This project booklet contains enough material to cover 4 or possibly 5 90 minute sessions. Students are encouraged to choose an image from a magazine or newspaper and then conduct a series of creative tasks that stem from the image. TIP: Magazines such as National Geographic are ideal for this task as they are packed with fantastic imagery. You could provide your students with an image if you wanted more control over the outcome, this could be random or connected to their wider projects. Task 1: VISUAL ANALYSIS - students recreate all or parts of the image using a variety of techniques and media (a list of 10 possible options is provided) Task 2: ANALYTICAL RESPONSE Students follow a series of prompts which will lead them to write a short passage about their own personal response to the image. Task 3: PERSONAL INVESTIGATION Students will gather additional images that are related to the themes / emotions / cultural connotations of the original image. They could organise these in a moodboard. Task 4: MAKING IN RESPONSE Students will use non traditional materials gathered from their home environments to make a series of small models/sculptures/maquettes that are inspired by the original image and subsequent findings. They will then draw these sculptures. This project translates extremely well to remote or blended learning and was originally designed for this purpose during the first lockdown. The download contains one PDF document, containing everything you need. Why not use it as a mini workbook and get your group to complete 1 task per week over the next 4 weeks? I’d love to hear how this project worked out for you. Please leave me a review to let me know how you get on :-) Best wishes Hannah

This short workbook will guide your students to analyse a range of paintings before choosing one to recreate and write an article about. It was originally created for Level 3 students to be completed as a remote learning activity during the first lockdown. The booklet contains 3 activities: RESEARCH - students are asked to identify, describe and present five of their favourite paintings. (visual example provided) RECREATE - students are asked to recreate a section of their favourite one of the five paintings. (visual example provided) RESPOND - students are asked to use a list of prompts to write a magazine style article or review of their favourite painting. Depending on how much time you have, this booklet could be followed as a complete session. However I have also found that it works well to give the research task as a piece of homework prior to the practical work which should be completed in session. The article also works well as a homework task, especially if computer access is limited.

It’s not possible to visit museums and galleries in person at the moment, but this task offers your students a chance to gather some valuable research by taking a virtual tour of London’s “Museum of Brands”. A link to the online exhibition is provided in the PDF. Upon “virtually” arriving at the exhibition, your students should complete A Scavenger Hunt, which has a number of questions such as: How would you describe the colours in the exhibition? Eg. neutral, bright, retro, flesh Does the exhibition remind you of anything else – what? Later, students are asked to reflect on their findings and create a proposal for an artwork in response to what they have seen. An example is provided. The exhibition contains lots of branding, packaging and retro advertisements from days gone by. This task would be ideal for a Graphics class, and was originally created for an Art Foundation group who were working on a week-long Typography project. It’s nice to see what students come up with when they try to apply their findings at the exhibition to their wider projects and ideas, but this task also works well as a standalone task to shake things up a bt :-) TIP You could stretch this task out by getting your students to actually make the work after creating their proposal. Since the exhibition contains lots of packaging and branding, they could make use of food packaging and other throwaway materials that they might have easy access to in their home environment.

This task highlights the important relationship between language and colour, and the benefits of using creative names to describe shades to help recall and mood building. I have gathered 24 of the quirkiest paint colour names available on the market, and your students will have the task of imagining the colour that those names describe and painting out a swatch to match. There is no right or wrong answer here, this is all about interpretation. During the task you might discuss how our own personal experiences, memories, culture and upbringing might effect the associations we make with certain words and colours.After painting their swatches, you can share the “answers” sheet and let your students see how close they were to mixing the original colours. Later, your students should develop some of their own swatches and give them appropriately imaginative names. These could be random, or linked to a wider project theme. For example, a student who was recently using Alice in Wonderland as a starting point for a textiles project gave her colours names like “Mr Rabbit” and “Tea Party”. A lovely task that slots into many subjects such as textiles and surface pattern, painting and colour theory. I would recommend 45 mins to an hour for this session, but it could take longer depending on how many swatches you ask your students to paint. Hope you find this resource helpful! Best wishes, Hannah

In this downloadable 2-page PDF, I have provided clear and detailed step by step instructions of how to use the Pathfinder tool in Adobe Illustrator. This tool allows the user to combine simple shapes to create more complex, bespoke shapes on screen. These instructions work well when combined with a demo from an instructor of how to use the tool, but I have also left students to follow these instructions independently so it could be used as a cover session. The second page contains a range of silhouettes that students should attempt to recreate during the second part of your session. These instructions were originally developed for a Level 3 Art and Design group.

In this task, your students will be encouraged to consider the “non-art” materials that they have access to in their home environment. After gathering a range of materials, (or just one if that’s all they can get their hands on - a newspaper will do nicely!), they will apply actions from Richard Serra’s verb list to generate experimental results. Encourage your learners to consider the double meaning of some of the verbs, and to use a dictionary to define the words they do not understand, rather than going for the first, easy option. Using photography as a means of recording their experiments, the students should later select and edit their most successful images into some sort of coherent collection. Examples are provided from both Richard Serra and my own experiments, and a list of discussion questions are provided to inspire and challenge your learners. This activity was originally created for a Level 3 Art Foundation group who are working remotely, and took 3 hours to complete. The download contains a 2-page PDF which is easily emailed or shared in Teams to help your remote sessions run smoothly. I hope you find this resource to be useful! Best wishes :-) Hannah

This mini project, entitled “Inside Looking Out” encourages students working in “lockdown” to generate artwork based on the view through windows and doorways of their home. The PDF brief includes both a practical and written task, that is appropriate for a range of levels (although was originally produced for Level 3). Included in the brief are links to several online articles and blog posts, containing examples of other artists working in lockdown, or with views through the window as their main theme. Included in the brief is an extensive list of artist and designers who have produced work from their window, and these cover a wide range of disciplines including drawing and painting, photography, graphics and printmaking.