play

The Teacher's Wellbeing Cycle

in , ,

The school I work at gave everyone the option of a day doing other activities. This was ours! Little did I realise that blowing your nose during a cycle is a bad move for the people behind you (sorry Mike - what can I say? I am an amateur and I have heavy nostrils…).

teacher Cycle final 1.jpg

A few process notes

For those of you who have been here before this should come as no surprise but here are the usual stages outline in the snapshots below.

  • Gathering raw materials (I also had a few photos but I thought I’d spare my friends the shame)

  • Some biro/sketchbook notes for initial thinking and shifting basic ideas about

  • Clip Studio Paint for first tidy pencils

  • Affinity Designer for vectors (moving back and forth between my iMac and iPad to get the best of the different input methods¹)

    • initial inking

    • shade

    • colours

    • layout

¹ Apple Pencil is the best way of drawing. The bigger iMac screen with a trackpad/mouse is a lot better for organising and arranging compositional elements - especially when it comes to the millions of layers that vectors produce).

A few screenshots


How to make a 'simple' origami pyramid

in , ,

I bought a ‘5 minute’ origami set from the bargain shelf at my local Waterstones this weekend. The guide it came with wasn’t good enough so I made a better one.

Process notes:

The original guide in the book wasn’t at all clear.

I went online and studied a couple of YouTube tutorials. Here is the one I found most helpful.

After practicing this one through a few times I decided I would sketch the stages for myself - as a way of learning the process. I ended up with 52 drawings. No wonder the original guide wasn’t clear enough!

I then tried to arrange and order it into some clearly defined sections - I ended up with five:

  • initial folds

  • diamond

  • kite

  • inner flaps

  • inflate

I opened up affinity designer on the Mac to do some laying out.

Finally I created an A2 image in Procreate and started sketching my original drawings into this composition, making a few tweaks as I went. Please feedback if you manage to successfully make the pyramid. The end inflation bit is quite difficult I think.