William Patten Primary School
Back in March 2022, we visited William Patten Primary School in Hackney to explain our project – how we would be designing billboards, working on portfolios and making a documentary and and invited our young audience of 9-11 years old to apply if they were interested to take part, and ONLY if they really wanted to do it… And guess what? 51 applied within a day. The only sour note for us being that we could only take 12 with us…
The workshops
Over the first three sessions, they got to explore lots of ways of coming up with their own ideas and concepts while having fubox blind drawing, turning the invisible visible, creating self-portraits and exploring messages freely through several initial group pieces to get ready to tackle the task of making a giant billboard as a group.
The children came together as a group very rapidly, which wasn’t a given, as many of them hadn’t really interacted before, and two years of covid meant that group work had not been top of the school agenda for obvious reasons.
The billboard concept
Sessions 4 to 6 were dedicated to making decisions about the billboard itself. They opted unanimously for a more cartoony style with individual avatars representing each and every one of them, adding speech bubble messages for the people of Hackney and beyond!
We brought in illustrator Sion Ap Tomos to give them some (felt)tips of the trade to develop their design ideas to life.
One wonderful thing to witness time and time again was how every child beamed as they came up with ideas, how fast it happened, and how hard they concentrated as creating their work, often helping each other with ideas, feedback or just enthusiastic appreciation.
Our sessions lasted an hour most times, which we thought would be plenty at the end of the school day, but on the occasion where we had a 2 hour window, all of them cheered.
In fact, the main feedback from every single one of them is that they’d wished that the sessions had been longer, and gone on well beyond our allocated 6 weeks. Oh, and a regular supply of choice biscuits helped rather a bit, it seems.
The message
In our very last sessions, we worked to bring all of their designs together on a screen for a final check, any amends, but also choosing a suitable background to offset their creations. Once again, the decision was unequivocal (or pretty vocal!) with a certain rainbow splatter. It was yes at first sight.
One thing remained, and it was to consider if they wanted an overall message to tie it all together. Inspired by their spirit and positivity, the message developed by Tristan in his own quasi hieroglyphic bubble felt just right: B who U R.
And we heard them loud of and clear. We should all embrace our own quirks, cheesiness to follow our heart and our passions – we can only be better for it, and the world too.
Project Team
William Patten project team have been collaborating on this Billboard.
