Cystic Fibrosis: New Sketch-Project

Happy New Year folks! Hope you all had a good Christmas and a nice rest. Mine was lovely. I enjoyed relaxing, but also did some stitching: I started something new straight after the exhibition came down. I'll show you when it's done.

Anyway, remember back in November, I was making more concertina sketchbooks, preparing for a new residency, working with York University? Well, I have now done two sketching days and, so far, it is all going really well.

York's research project, called PARC (Pathways, Practices and Architectures: Containing Antimicrobial Resistance in the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic), interviews sufferers of CF to try and find out how they feel about their experiences of going to Out-Patients for their regular check-ups.

I am using my concertinas, so I can get flow between images and create longer pieces of artwork with everything on together, rather than lots of individual drawings, as I did with the 'day in the life of a site manager', or architect. As you can see from the complete example above, these concertinas are much shorter than those I used in Australia, or with the Unfolding Stories project at the Morgan Centre. This is necessary, because this is a much shorter residency, so I need to be able to make them as quickly and easily as possible.

Of course, it's never great having to visit hospitals, but it's particularly awkward if you have Cystic Fibrosis, because there is such a high risk of patients cross-infecting one another within the hospital, if steps aren't taken to help prevent it. On top of this, the processes designed to help stop cross-infection can easily make the patient experience less pleasant. 

How my part in the project works, is that doctors at different hospitals find volunteers for us, patients who are happy not only to be interviewed, but also sketched! We catch them after a check-up appointment and the researcher spends about an hour chatting to them, while I scribble away, doing my best to capture what I can.

One of the issues I have to contend with during the sketching, is the need for anonymity. It's important that I paint the interviewees as I see them, to capture their body-language, because it's that which makes them feel authentic, but I have to alter key elements of their appearance, such as hair-colour, age, glasses etc. (all the names you see on the sketchbooks are made up, by the way). This approach is a new experiment for me and I wasn't sure how easy it would be to pull off, but it seems to be working out okay. 

The other, slightly trickier issue, which I quickly realised when we got going on the project, is that, if we're not careful, the sketchbooks will become visually dull and very samey - basically, there's only so much you can do with a person and what they say. The environment the interviews are done in is generally a very sterile room and not relevant anyway. 

So I have been going into the hospital registration and waiting areas after the interviews, trying to capture the environments which come up in the interviews. This makes things more visually varied, but also helps to give context to the quotes I'm recording. 

The only trouble is, since the actual interviews are over by that stage, I have had to rely on the researcher's notes / recordings, to add additional text to those sections of the sketchbooks, after the event, otherwise the sketchbooks wouldn't flow properly. This was a technique I used a lot in Australia, because in some environments it was hard to hear what was being said, or too difficult to listen and draw at the same time.

We will be visiting three different hospitals during the project and I'll be going back two or three times to each, but the visits will be stretched out over several months. The two days we have done so far have been in a particularly good hospital, one which is working hard to protect their CF patients. Sufferers we interviewed gave very good feedback about their experiences, although there are still lots of issues coming out around the waiting areas and how CF patients are viewed by non-CF sufferers. 

As always, the sketching element has been fun, but the finding-out-new-stuff part of the work adds to it immeasurably. It feels good to be giving ordinary people a voice too. I so enjoy the sociability of the work as well, compared to what my working day used to involve when I was a book illustrator - basically me on my own in the studio for 3 months!

If you fancy having a go at working on a quick mini-concertina, they are extremely easy to make. My illustrated 'how to' post show you step-by-step what to do. I can't recommend the format enough - it is so liberating not to have to work within the confines of the usual page edges.

A Day-in-the-Life of a Construction-Site Manager

Remember back in the summer, I did a project with York University, looking at what architects do all day? Well, the researchers were so pleased with the results, they asked me to do another, similar project - they wanted to carry on to the next stage of the building process and look at what happens when the plans get to the building site.

We did it the wrong way round really: I was slightly dreading having to sketch outside in November weather. I took lots and lots of layers with me. As it turned out, we were very lucky. It did rain on us right at the start, but it was a very mild day for the time of year and not windy at all. Phew.

The site was a massive development in the centre of Rochdale. We had to start at the crack of dawn, because we needed to be on site for their start of day, which meant staying in a hotel in Rochdale the evening before and getting up and out so early that we missed the cooked breakfast! Damn. This research-sketching work is always so interesting though, I didn't really mind. 

Come 7am, I had already checked out of the hotel with the researcher, Chrissy, and we were trailing our wheelie-suitcases through the still dark streets of Rochdale in the rain, following Google Maps. The site soon loomed up - it was so big it engulfed most of the town centre. Luckily we were given a brew as soon as we got on-site, then we were kitted out in the obligatory big boots, reflective jackets and hardhats. Amazingly, they found some in my size. 

Basically, Chrissy and I shadowed Josh, the Site Manager, throughout his day, with Chrissy scribbling everything he said and did in her notebook, and me painting and drawing what I could capture. It was even more fast and furious than I'm used to. The indoor meetings were okay but, once we got outdoors, Josh was moving back and forth between different contractors on different parts of the site and hardly stood still for a moment, so the sketches got a bit rough and ready.

I loved trailing around behind Josh all day, finding out about the different elements of his work. It seemed pretty stressful stuff, with so much responsibility. He was basically keeping an overview and trouble-shooting, to make sure the right things were happening in the right way, and that all the different contractors could do what they needed, without being in each other's way.

And it was brilliant getting access to the site. Much of it was still big holes in mud, but there was one building starting to go up - just iron girders with basic stairs and floors in place. The dark section you can see in the photo below is the beginnings of banked seating for a cinema screen: 

We went up a few floors to talk to welders and scaffolders. Sparks occasionally fell like fireworks from the other side of the floor above and large areas were shrouded in a green netting, which Josh told us was because they were spraying the girders with fire-resistant paint and they didn't want the paint drifting out over the people and cars below. 

The construction team were really easy-going about being drawn. The men outside, in particular, were far too busy to be bothered, although one man kept asking me if I would do a drawing for his girlfriend!

We went in and out, moving backwards and forwards between meetings with managers of one sort or other in the nice warm site office and the much briefer catch-ups with different men on site, sorting out issues. 

It was handy for my purposes that Josh was reasonably distinctive-looking with a beard and slightly prominent ears, so he was easy to pick out in the sketches. Useful too, that he was fairly young and attractive, so I didn't have to worry about not making him look fat, balding or ugly! It can be a slight issue if you are drawing the same person over and over. 

Some of the text quotes were recorded as I went along, particularly the indoor meetings but, on the whole when we were outdoors, it was so challenging that I was struggling to capture just the visual elements, so there was no way I could get text too. That's why there's been a gap of a month between me doing the sketches and finishing the work - I had to wait until Chrissy had extracted some suitable quotes from her mountains of notes, before I could add them in (an unenviable task). This was the system we often used in Australia and we had the same problems with it drawing things out somewhat, but sometimes it is the only way.

Because it had been such an early start, and because I still had a long journey to get back home to Sheffield, we cheated slightly and didn't stay until the end of the day. By half way through the afternoon, we had more than enough material.

Back in York, Chrissy and her team selected eleven of the A4 sketches from eighteen I had created. When they had given me the bits of added text they wanted to include, I scanned everything and laid things out in the same rainbow pencil boxes I'd used for the architect project.

This day was all part of a much larger body of research, Buildings in the Making, about how you create buildings which are truly fit for purpose, how healthy they are for us and how buildings we work and live in make us feel. The researchers are mostly interested in the issues around architecture for hospitals and care homes. This work is linked to the residency I'm currently doing on Cystic Fybrosis clinics in hospitals - it's the same research team.

The university will use my sketchwork as a way to interest different parties who are not going to engage with turgid academic papers. Sketches are a very effective way of getting people's attention and are a great conversation starter, with the ability to communicate ideas swiftly in a way that anyone can grasp. 

Exhibition of my Australia Sketchbooks

Although I finished my Australian residency back in May this year, we didn't have a proper exhibition of the work at the time, just in informal event with wine and nibbles, in the research centre itself:

Six months later, the sketchbooks have at last all been exhibited in Perth in what looks to be a far posher venue! This delay was because something rather dramatic happened during my residency... 

When I was commissioned to do the work, the Centre for Transformative Work Design was part of the University of Western Australia but, by the time I arrived in Perth to begin my work, Professor Parker had already decided that she wanted to move her research centre from UWA to Curtin University, the rival Perth university. The whole time I was working there, secret negotiations were going on behind the scenes. It was all a bit cloak and dagger!

The deal came to fruition around the time I came back to England. UWA were not best pleased to lose the centre and so we put things on ice until the researchers had settled in at Curtin. 

I got an email last week, showing me some fabulous photos from what seemed to be a very successful event. Prof Parker did a talk about the residency, using my very first batch of sketches, from the tip attendant in Peaceful Bay's rubbish dump, as an illustration of how useful the visual record is to her research.

They had all the project's research-sketching competition entries on-screen too, as well as photos from 'behind the scenes' - me in action in various places, I assume, like these photos of me sketching at a massive opencast mine site, in Wyalla:

For the exhibition, they had some of my work printed onto canvas and they displayed those pieces on easels, which was an interesting way to create visual contrast in the space:

It's such a shame that I couldn't be there in person, but so lovely to see the photos and hear about how the event. You can see more photos here.

Illustrations of 'A-Day-in-the-Life'

In my last post, I told you about the day of sketching I did in the offices of a team of architects. If you remember, it was slightly different to my usual work: this time, the client wanted the sketches as part of an illustration for a report. 

The original brief was to create a double-page spread of images, which communicated what an architect did all day. I did as many sketches as I could on my day out, with the idea that we could choose the best, say 5 or 6 images, which I would montage together later, using Photoshop, to create the final illustration.

But when the researchers saw the 13 sketches, they didn't want to use less than half of them. It seemed a waste. What to do? They went back and looked at their costings. They had the idea of an illustrated pull-out, which would give me six A4 pages to fill with illustrations, instead of just two. They spoke to their printer and asked for a quote. I waited with baited breath...

… and a couple of days later, I got the go-ahead! 

The researchers sent me a list of additional text and quotes that they wanted me to add to the images, taken from the research notes that were made on the day. I had to write each quote out by hand, so it would match the text I'd drawn originally, and then scan it all in. I used speech bubbles for a lot of the new text, to add visual variety and stop things getting fussy.

I spent all of Monday at my computer, laying the images out. In the end, we only had to lose one sketch, because 12 worked out so well: two images per page. 

With all that extra text, I decided the individual sketches needed boxes around them, so the pages looked less bitty. But I didn't want formal, computer-drawn boxes - they needed to be sketchy. I drew half a dozen with my rainbow pencil and scanned them in too. 

Here are the finished 6 illustrations, in order, through the architect's day. I think the effect with the boxes works rather well in the end. I am relieved that they are being used larger too, as I was concerned that the text might be a little hard to read, if I had to squeeze lots of images into a much smaller space. 

I have sent everything off to York University. I can't wait to see how it looks as a pull-out.

A Day in the Life of an Architect

So what do architects do all day? To be honest, I wasn't really sure.

I know they design buildings and spaces, probably more on a computer than at a drawing board these days, but that's where my knowledge stops. Or stopped. Last week, as it happens, I got the opportunity to find out, first hand, and I took along my sketchbook, naturally.

I had been commissioned to create an illustration for a final project report, by researchers at York University. The project analyses and discusses how care homes are designed and built, and why. The researcher who contacted me said she would like an image which gave some insight into what an architect did during a typical day. 

I wasn't that happy about doing it though, because I didn't want to draw it from imagination, since I had no clear idea what they do, or what their environment might look like. I said the drawings would have much more of an authentic and natural feel if I was able to see and draw an architect actually at work. So the researcher paid me to spent a day at an architect's practice near Selby. Perfect.

They were tucked away in the grounds of a stately home turned hotel, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It was quite a journey to get there. I arrived just as people were preparing for a big meeting. My job was to shadow one particular architect, April, and sketch her activities through the day.

The meeting was really interesting, with about a dozen people around a big table, discussing a project which was obviously in the early stages of development. 

It was very animated, with lots of back and forth, pointing at drawings and making changes to plans because of various problems. It was much more tricky to capture than all those meetings at the Morgan Centre, where people mostly sat and listened, but I did my best. 

After lunch, April went back to her desk to work on a drawing for a different project. She showed me a print-out of a long building which the client wanted to appear like a terrace of buildings. 

Her designing was indeed mostly done on the computer, but she did also do some hand-drawing, working things out. She felt that the shapes of the ends of the building needed altering, to make the overall effect more attractive, but this had knock-on effects to the footprint of the rooms and the roof-line. So she sat and sketched for a few minutes:

One of the surprises for me, was how much collaboration went on. The office was a large, open-plan space. But although individuals had their own, quite spacious work areas, people often got up and went to chat things through with each other.

So it was a far more sociable job than I might have anticipated. It seemed like fairly high pressure though. 

I was pleased that I managed to capture quite a few different elements of the work. What I have to do next is find a way of putting together a selection of the sketches, to create a montage. 

The final illustration is to be a double spread, so two A4 sheets. The York researchers are going to have a meeting tomorrow, to chose their favourite images from everything I created and to let me know if there is any additional text they want to incorporate, then I have another day to fiddle around in Photoshop and bring things together. What an interesting project it has turned into.

You can see many more similar reportage projects on my website here. If you want to discuss a future project, contact me here.