Keynote speaker: Dr. Andrew Causey
We are extremely pleased to announce our keynote speaker, artist-ethnographer Dr. Andrew Causey.
Dr. Causey is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College, Chicago, and author of the recently published, Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method.
Keynote Topic: The average person reads and interprets thousands of images per day–not surprisingly doing most of it with little more than a glance. According to Dr. Andrew Causey, the cost of this massive amount of processing is that we end up missing the deep content and context of the world around us.
At the 2nd Annual 2017 Sketching In Practice Conference, Causey will share insights from his recently published book, Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method, on how line drawing can be used to build a more attentive, and deeper form of perception.
Find out more about Dr. Andrew Causey at https://twitter.com/CAndrewCausey, http://www.utpteachingculture.com/drawn-to-see-drawing-as-an-ethnographic-method/.
Amy Burvall is an educator, artist, curator, writer, speaker and learner. After a 21 year teaching career in the Humanities, she has most recently worked as an instructional designer writing curriculum based on creativity, design, storytelling, and innovation. She has been called a “professional recomninant”, an “edupunk”, and a “pragmartist”, and and perhaps is best known for her History for Music Lovers YouTube series.
Session title: Mad for Metaphor: Sketching Complexity
Workshop overview: (sketching materials will be provided but bring your favourite drawing device/materials if you’d like).
From cave walls to Facebook walls we have always embraced visual communication. With the changing media landscape, our streams, memes, and zines have exploded with imagery, ushering in a need for visual literacy skills, and in particular, metaphorical thinking. Technology has affected knowledge in such a way as to diminish the value of “raw” information and increase the value of sense-making, as well as chip away at attention spans, sparking a need for distillation of complex ideas. Images can essentialize the cumbersome in beautiful ways. They have a “stickiness” for the viewer and challenge the critical thinking of the creator.
This immersive, hands-on session explores the power of metaphorical thinking paired with visualization. Participants will have a chance to sketch with the creative constraints of over 25 prompts. These exercises will both push one’s thinking and hone visual communication skills.
Amy highlights activities from her newly released book, Intention: Critical Creativity in the Classroom.
Note: this session is appropriate for anyone involved in the communication of ideas (learner / teacher / corporate).
This session is also being offered by Amy Burvall.
Session title: iOSify your Images, Breathing Life Into Your Drawings with Technology
Workshop overview: (Some materials provided but each participant needs an iOS device with a drawing app and the ability to purchase other apps. It is recommended that apps are acquired ahead of the session. Amy uses Paper by Fifty-Three for the drawing).
You’ve made a great original image..now what? How can you breathe life into your drawing, making it more poignant and impactful? Amy shares her go-to techniques for creating simple animations with iOS devices and apps. Explore stop-motion, gifs, adding sound and squiggle movement…all with the convenience of your phone or tablet! Play and tinker with other apps that can augment your doodles in various ways and learn how to leverage these “app smashes” for your academic, creative, or entrepreneurial work.
Suggested apps:
For Macbook:
- Keynote
For mobile (ipad and iphone is preferable):
*must have
- ImgPlay*
- Splice*
- Megaphoto*
- MotionPortrait*
- Thinglink
- Squigglish
- Enlight
- Explain Everything
- TypeDrawing
- ShadowPuppet
Kara Sievewright and Robin Folvik
Kara Sievewright and co-presenter Robin Folvik are members of the The Graphic History Collective, (GHC) a group of activists, artists, writers, and researchers passionate about comics, history and social change.
Session title: Remember | Resist | Redraw: Creating Radical Graphic History Posters
Workshop overview: The Graphic History Collective (GCH) is a group of activists, artists, writers, and researchers passionate about comics, history, and social change. In 2017, we launched a collaborative project called Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Project to critically intervene in the Canada 150 conversation. With this project, the GHC hopes to encourage people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for radical change in 2017 and beyond.
This workshop will introduce participants to the work of the Graphic History Collective and the radical history poster project. We will explore questions of storytelling, ethics, and representing graphic histories and introduce and practice various hand-drawn techniques for poster design including lettering, tracing and drawing with and over historical images. Using some of these techniques and inspiration from other radical posters, the participants will create their own posters. We will encourage participants to bring images, quotes, and stories of movements or histories that they or their communities have been part of that they would want to document as a radical history poster.
Find out more at www.graphichistorycollective.ca
Lorraine White–Wilkinson is an Arts Educator/Sessional Instructor dept of Education SFU
Session title: Sketching Off the Page
Workshop overview: Sketching Off the Page takes drawing into the 3-dimensional realm and into a full body physical expression of the elements of visual art as they intersect with the elements of movement. As an experiential learning workshop, participants are taken through a full body warm up that introduces the elements of dance and warms up the mind to creative possibilities linking the visual page to embodied representations. The act of solo and co-operative sketching on paper weaves its way into remarkable ‘sketchings off the page’ : sketchings that invite a sense of presence that moves from the connection of pencil to paper, into body-to-body connections through dance, which further invite the connections of heart and mind. These connections are revealed as complex and profound as they challenge and broaden the perception of what sketching is and what it can be.
Find out more at: www.educationaldance.ca
Katarina (Kat) Thorsen is an artist, creative engagement facilitator
Session title: Molly- a true crime analysis online graphic novel
Presentation: Participants will learn about Katarina’s 14+ year involvement in Canada’s most important unsolved cold case- The Babes in the Wood (as profiler, researcher, now writer/illustrator) and how she now uses an online weekly serial format (Jan 15-Nov 19 2017) to present her work. Participants will learn:
• about the case and how Katarina got involved
• how her relationship with the case evolved over time
• how drawing is essential to the work
• how the decision to go online came about
• the importance of visual storytelling and the use of music to enhance the experience
• simple visual techniques to tell their own story
Katarina will share openly about her passion project/life’s work through audiovisual and take the participants through a Lynda Barry inspired story project.
This session is also being offered by Katarina (Kat) Thorsen
Session title: Drawn Together Wheatpaste/Street Art Project
Workshop overview: Participants will:
• learn how creative engagement builds connections, creates safe space and fosters dialogue
• learn about the use of street art techniques to engage community
• experience hands on drawing and wheatpaste techniques and as a group create a mural.
Kat uses a friendly “follow me” approach that takes the participants through in depths drawing techniques. The resulting drawings are cut out and used in a group mural.
No previous drawing experience necessary
Project tools will be supplied
Note: these are two separate presentations. Find out more about Katarina (Kat) Thorsen at https://katthorsen.com/
Vjeko Sager is an artist, educator and curator, awarded, exhibited and represented in public and private collections in Canada, Japan, Hungary, Italy, USA and former Yugoslavia.
Session title: Creative Nomad
Live sketching demonstration / performance: I practice “nomadic creativity” on a daily basis. I carry a portable studio (backpack filled with drawing & sketching materials) and a sketchbook, looking for hidden corners in coffee shops, where I sketch and draw my ideas. Over time, this ritual has evolved into a large body of works (containing more than thousand drawings).
My presentation involves setting up a pop-up studio and performing my sketching rituals. Additionally, I will present my sketchbooks and engage in a conversation with SKIP’s participants. This project/presentation aspires to stimulate creativity and promote sketching as the most versatile and engaging creative strategy.
Find out more about Vjeko Sager’s at: <http://www.connect.ecuad.ca/~vsager/> or download a copy of his recent works: Vjeko Sager WORKS 2016
Gabe Wong is an Emily Carr Instructor and graphic designer.
Session title: Reclaiming Writing – Adapting Writing Systems as an Expression of Cultural Autonomy
Workshop overview: Writing is a visual act. How we write is an expression of our culture. Through different orthographies, the form of our writing is loaded with meaning, creating references to a culture’s history and relationships. Often, a writing system can be seen as a product and tool of colonization and assimilation, and once it exists, it cannot be taken away. By reclaiming the way we write and taking ownership of our own writing system, we can also take ownership of our own culture and identity. Even a subtle change in the way we write can be an expression of our individual and cultural autonomy.
In this workshop, participants will sketch and develop alternative ways of writing that best represent their culture or history. Culture in this workshop is wide ranging, it can refer to a nation, but can also refer to groups with shared experiences, e.g. second-generation or queer culture. Participants can draw and develop new glyphs, draw new calligraphic approaches or explore different ways to writing. They will then share their developments, through their novel writing, with their peers.
Find out more about Gabe Wong at http://gabewong.com/
Suk Kyoung Choi is a Korean artist and current PhD candidate at the School of Interactive Arts
and Technology, SFU. Her work examines metaphors of artistic process in order to understand the nature of transformation between experience and knowledge.
Session title: How smooth is a mountain? Exploring the texture of lived space.
Workshop overview: We attempt to communicate when we draw, but how do we connect conceptual form with the marks we make? Does this connection suggest we live in similar or very different visual worlds?This workshop explores the use of drawing to explore the textural geometry of embodied space. The workshop will take the form of a mediated experiment where participants sketch their interpretation of an automatically generated inspirational phrase describing a scene.
Starting from a brief presentation of my research interest in the conceptual metaphors of texture and their relationship to environmental frequency, we will explore our individually embodied understandings of the space – time we inhabit. This exercise offers an increased awareness of how meaning is wrapped up in embodied (personal) metaphor, and a deeper understanding of how we may access previously hidden dimensions of experience. Come to experiment, explore, reflect, and engage in imaginative play! Drawing reaches into the subconscious: If you can
feel you can draw. All levels of drawing welcome.
Find out more about Suk Kyoung Choi at https://skchoi.org/
Stef Lenk is an artist, graphic designer and medical illustrator. She is currently a PhD researcher at Freie University Berlin.
Session title: Peripatetic lines: on reading (and ‘writing’) wordless stories
Workshop overview: The intent of this workshop is to introduce the skill of ‘reading images’ without language as a crutch. I will present two self-created wordless graphic narratives; participants will ‘read’ and then write their interpretations down. We will then share and compare these interpretations, discussing what does and doesn’t work (relative to the initial goals of the narratives), how visual stories differ from text narratives in terms of reading experience, and how visual metaphor can open up a story to create more universal significance to audiences.
Find out more about Stef Lenk at http://steflenk.com/
Patrick Pennefather has been integrating visual note taking and low fidelity cave drawings in many an ideation session that he’s facilitated with learners and clients from a wide cross-section of the digital media industry at the MDM Program where he’s taught for almost 10 years. He is currently writing his first book on the perils of teaching and learning in VR.
Session title: What tool when: Developing a vocabulary of visual heuristics
Workshop overview: Facilitating learners with clients in meetings and ideation sessions in a project-based learning environment is a complicated yet rewarding teaching and learning opportunity. Participants will learn a vocabulary of strategic maps that learners at the MDM Program draw from to organize sessions, rapidly generate ideas visibly, align stakeholders on prioritized needs, identify problems to solve, propel projects forward within limited time-frames and more. Participants will also be exposed to specific use-cases where strategic maps were used in addition to trigger phrases that led teams to draw from specific visual tools and maps during ideation sessions with clients.
Find out more about Patrick Pennefather at: CDM profile: https://thecdm.ca/people/faculty/dr-patrick-pennefather and blog: http://disruptivegame.patrickpennefather.com/?p=678
Joshua Korenblat is an Assistant Professor, Graphic Design, State University of New York at New Paltz.
Session title: : Dark matter and dinosaurs: Sketching the invisible
Workshop overview: How can we illustrate an idea when all of the actors are not visible or even tangible? We’re familiar with the idea of systems through ecosystems, which manifest themselves in observable natural events. Donella Meadows of MIT applied ecosystems toward human communities, coining the term “systems thinking.” A system is greater than its constituent parts, which interrelate for a natural function or human purpose.
Today, systems thinking drives many innovative initiatives in science and economics. Whether the system is natural or human, we can identify common qualities. Patterns of behavior that change over time can be identified, creating surface events. Structures create these patterns, and we can even draw the deeper mystery of how a function or purpose activates these structures. In a system, sketchers can create portraits of actors, contain them in hierarchical frames, and draw relationships with arrows. These parts can then be organized meaningfully in space. In a virtual Realtime Board, we’ll sketch a system that connects seemingly unrelated events—dark matter, the demise of the dinosaurs, and the rise of mammals. We’ll discuss how this exercise applies in practical contexts.
Find out more about Joshua Korenblat at graphicacy.com and the-joshua-tree.com
This is a virtual collaborative presentation, using Trello and Realtime Board.
Jessica Motherwell, Ph.D. is an instructor at the Justice Institute of BC.
Session title: : Using comics to rehearse best practices (co-presented with Krista Lambert).
Workshop overview: How students used a comic book app, Blackboard blog and ticking clock to co-create course content and demonstrate social justice action: An example of upstanding to sexism and homophobia.
Our learning challenge was to have students generate their own scenarios, stop wrongful behaviour and bring everyone back into right relationships — a process using students own social construction of knowledge.
Rather than lecture, we challenged students to dramatize best practice via a series of comic book panels. Teams of students were given an iPad with a comic book app to create the photo-based comic representations of the witnessed scenarios. Then each team contributed its comic book page to our collaborative, “Upstander’s Comic Book” (a.k.a. – a Blackboard blog). Then everyone engaged in rich feedback on each teams comics using the blog comments option. There was one catch — the comics had to be storyboarded, created and posted in less than 10 minutes!
Come and join us for this fast and fun session. And yes, there will be a ticking clock!
Find out more about Jessica Motherwell’s work at drjessicamotherwell.ca
Krista Lambert is an instructional designer at the Justice Institute of
British Columbia’s Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI).
She holds an MEd in educational technology and learning design from Simon
Fraser University. Her CTLI projects range from designing and developing
open educational resources (OER) to instructional support for online and
face-to-face courses.
Session title: : Using comics to rehearse best practices (co-presented with Jessica Motherwell).
Workshop overview: See description above.
Alon Chitayat is an educator, artist and senior UX and motion designer at Google. Alon will be presenting LIVE from NYC on one of Googles latest offerings, Jamboard. Now available in the Play and iTunes stores respectively.
As an adjunct professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Alon’s work weaves together traditional and digital drawing tools to create entirely new experiences: collaborative real-time drawing booths, 3D drawing apps, and cross-media storytelling platforms. Nothing is out of reach for his pen, paper, and imagination.
Alon’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tribeca Film Festival, ARS Electronica and SIGGRAPH. He has worked with a range of clients over the years including Audi, The Museum of the City of New York (Local Projects), Adidas, and FiftyThree.
Session title: Sketch Duet: An Experiment In Co-Creativity
Workshop overview: What would two painters improvising look like?
Musicians, dancers, and actors have always used improvisation for collaborative dialogue. This spontaneous conversation sparks new ideas, energy, and inspiration. As a visual artist, I envy that kind of collaboration. This talk presents a series of artistic projects that explore real-time collaboration through drawing. The resulting composition emerges from the joyful interplay of the two artists, whether face-to-face or miles apart.
Joan CawleyCrane
Joan CawleyCrane is a Senior Lecturer at Central Washington University, in the Department of Art, in Ellensburg (AKA The Heart of) Washington. Joan teaches art history, drawing, printmaking, and paper making, and organizes the annual Dias de los Muertos.
Session title: The Journal: Journey/Process/Map, and more
Session overview:A journal can provide a wide range of results: from detailed documents of exploration – from the scientific to the personal – to the rhetorical/conceptual. Considering some of the methods and processes of journaling, we will consider each for their use as communication tools.
Participants will hear about/see examples and then be given exercises to begin their own experiences in writing/drawing.
Journals will be approached with a range of intents: information gathering, problem-solving, recording ideas/events/places, and time.
Q and A, experimentation, and sharing will round out the session.