I’ve just finished a big mural project at St Paul’s C of E Primary School in Hook, near Chessington.

The project began with three days working with the whole school, class by class, creating colurful birds, leaves, flowers and buildings using a variety of media from acrylic to collage and coloured pencil.

Year 2 created some amazing collage vehicles, while Year 3 drew their own homes with great detail and a dash of imagination:

Other year groups experimented with colour mixing to create dozens of different shades for bricks and leaves, year 4 drew beautiful birds and year 6 worked in groups to make large collage/drawings of key buildings in or connected to the area, including Southwark Cathedral as a focal point.

I painted their drawings onto the boards and collaged on the cut out bricks, then added all the richness of bird and plant life, as well as the homes and vehicles that the children created (including an unfeasibly large number of tanks!).

It’s the third time I’ve worked at St Paul’s and it was lovely to recognise so many children and to see how their creative work has developed over the years.

In July I spent some time at Bainbridge Studios screen printing a limited edition poster of all the beautiful drawings done by Year 6 at Cannon Barnett Primary School, Whitechapel. The drawings were done during workshops I did with the class in May exploring their local built environment for the English Heritage pilot project, Special Places. The class also chose a building they wanted to list and presented their ideas to a team from Tower Hamlets planning department, and visited a live conservation project at Altab Ali park with Ben Pearce from High Street 2012. The project came to a conclusion on July 14th with a visit to the school from Baroness Andrew, the chair of English Heritage, who presented all the children in the class with their screen printed posters, and in return, they presented her with one of the posters which she has promised to frame and display in her office,

Year 6 were a fantastic class to work with, as were teachers Peter and Laurens,  and I thoroughly enjoyed the project. Both English Heritage and Tower Hamlets are hoping to repeat the project in other schools in the future.

I’ve just finished a two week project in Whitechapel for English Heritage, with Year 6 at Canon Barnett Primary School.

Equipped with sketchbooks, the class have been walking and drawing the built heritage of the area, as well as making collages, seeing behind the scenes at the renovations at Altab Ali park, and making a presentation to professionals from English Heritage and Tower Hamlets council about which local features they would like to see listed. We also visited the Ian Berry photography exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery, which is practically next door to the school.

It’s been a very enjoyable project and the next step is for me to design then screen print a poster with the children’s drawings, which we will present to the chair of English Heritage in July. Looking forward to going back already.

I’ve just started a series of family learning workshops at Ham House - we will be creating a permanent timeline exhibit to celebrate the house’s 400th anniversary. For the first session I made badges for everyone, randomly allocating them a character from the house’s fascinating history.

I’ve been doing a series of education workshops at The Mall Galleries with different visiting schools from Lambeth. The children get to talk about paintings, choose a character from a piece of work in the current exhibition, then make their own book featuring doors into other worlds. The children have been so enthusiastic, it’s been great working there.

I’ve been designing family activities for visitors to Osterley House. There are six different activities altogether: for this one I designed a set of rubber stamps inspired by the Robert Adam architecture, and visitors will be able to mix them up to design their own buildings.

I’ve spent the last week working at St Paul’s C of E primary school, Hook, creating two large textile collage panels to celebrate the school’s 150th anniversary. The red words are the school’s values. Everyone from year 1 up to year 6 took part, and I completed the work by building two wooden frames and stretching the fabric over them for a neat finish.

Today was the end of the School Arts Partnership project with the National Trust at Morden Hall Park. I was the lead artist for the whole school year, and today we had an exhibition to celebrate, featuring the lovely paintings the children made in the park in May,

and the lanterns from the floating lantern festival last November,

as well as the mosaics we made last term. Then all the children from the two schools involved - Wimbledon Chase Primary and Cricket Green special needs school in Mitcham - wrote their memories of the project on a postcard and tied them to a tree with a ribbon:

In the evening Wimbledon Chase Primary School organised a special event for parents, also attended by the press and the Mayor of Merton, to mark the end of the project. It was a lovely evening - there was a documentary film, poems and singing, and then I had to sign autographs! A great way to finish the project - thanks to everyone involved.

I’ve been putting together another demonstration book, this time for a workshop plan I am writing for the education programme at the  Mall Galleries. It’s on a theme of doors, and children will each choose and create a character, then make a book with open-able doors to lead to a series of adventures. Back at school after the gallery visit, the children can write the narrative to go with the visuals they have created.

Today was the last day of the library project at Singlegate Primary School in Colliers Wood. All term I’ve been working on Friday afternoons with a group of children from different classes, making an installation for the library - including a wall hanging complete with collage nests, a flock of papier mache birds (I specially like this one with the smart scarf):

and - since the project is in the library - a set of hand-made books about the birds:

They were a great group and I will miss them all!