What stood out to me the most when researching WCT has been their overriding effort in giving a young audience a creative platform to share their stories and ideas. With their primary principle being ‘arts improve general wellbeing’ and that it builds up children’s confidence, curiosity and imagination, I wanted to make this adamant in my illustrations.
In the introducing video about WCT we see a variety of members share how the theatre has helped them “learn how to express themselves”, as well as giving them a space to “be ourselves and show how we feel without any judgement.” WCT is determined to help bring out young member’s confidence by guiding and pushing their ideas forward into a creation that is both enjoyable as well as creative.
This made me want to focus on individual members of WCT in my illustrations and the qualities that the community theatre has brought out in them. For my initial sketches I have been focusing on the theatre activities that the children have been involved in. I followed Anna’s colour scheme guidance of not using too many colours but rather few that are bright and contrasting. I created some collages to simply practice drawing the members while also creating lively illustrations that reflect the workshops. In one of the illustrations I used a photograph of one of the artistic directors and illustrated the children that take part in the workshops within. I created it in terms of a metaphor in which the skills from the team are being shared and end up flourishing in the children's flair.
Anna, the Co-Artistic Director, came in to review our process so far within the project and to give us some feedback on the work. This was the main feedback I noted down after having spoken to her:
- Make it bright, use a dominant colour in your artwork, eg. bright blue or bright pink
- Contrast is good - ie using a black or a dark background
- Use vivid colours to represent young people and their energy and excitement
- Could also add text from the questionnaire or session to personalise the illustrations
- Relate to the youth more than anything else
- Obtain as much data directly from the youth in the theatre