The Big Draw

Today I was a volunteer at the Big Draw East events in Bethnal Green. Its a campaign to promote drawing and to get people of all ages involved in being visually creative. The workshop I was helping out in was called Zero Carbon Flying Machines and aimed to promote sustainability and the importance of drawing in engineering.

So what did I do? I made paper aeroplanes with kids all day!! Not a bad way to spend your Sunday. The event was free, they provided you with all the arts materials you might need to build a crazy paper flying machine, and there were competitions for the longest distance your machine flew and largest wingspan. Prizes weren't too bad either: Ipod shuffles, K'nex sets and digital cameras. Me, Sarah and Alice attempted to make a floaty hovercraft thingy:

It looks a bit weird, but my smaller prototype frisbee managed to float if we kept wafting air under it, then some of the kids became inspired by it and wanted us to show them how to make your own, I was very chuffed because it was my idea C: so we thought we should make a HUGE one, for everyone to waft into the air. It didn't work very well, our wafting wasn't synchronised enough. Somebody commented that it looked like a quilt. But many kids were keen to help us sellotape (possibly to steal some of the glory of making it too) and in the end it looked the prettiest =P

I'm jaded I didn't get to meet Quentin Blake though. Apparently he opened the whole event at the Museum of Childhood across the road, but he never came to visit us. Quentin Blake is a famous children's illustrator, who's individual style of drawing brought many of my favourite characters to life. Those who grew up with reading Roald Dahl will know who I'm talking about. Sarah was lucky this morning, on the offchance someone pointed him out to her to give him coffee (!) and got him to draw Matilda in her diary, which I am extremely jealous of. I hope I'm free to go to the Covent Garden Big Draw in two weeks and hopefully bump into him there.

My workshop was being led by Ed McCann and Chris Wise, founder of Expedition Engineering, who incidentally sponsor our third year Constructionarium, so I'm glad I went today, just to have met them.

All in all, it was a good day. After all, I have new plane ideas now; more plane flying in the JCR this year!

[Googling for Matilda has made we want to read it again. I still have the book I grew up reading with the old 1988 cover and everything.]