A Canny Collective
A Canny Collective is a group of Emerging Illustrators from Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, founded in January of 2019. Our mission is to help new local illustrators have experience showing their art to the public and a chance to present their art professionally in a free to enter exhibition space, as well as a chance to sell their art and other merchandise on our Swag table.
February 2019 the collective put on the first exhibition titled 'A Canny Exhibition' with the theme centred around Valentines day. We are a very diverse young group of illustrators, having different life experiences, relationships, and views on not only the world but on ourselves. We wanted to celebrate diversity in out first exhibition focusing around love. Love is a wide subject and can be about loving someone, something, yourself, or the world. As you can imagine we each had some unique experiences and thoughts on the word 'Love'. You can read more about the event, and see what other's had to offer in my blog post on that: Link.
For my contribution to our exhibition I wanted to get people of the community to get involved and share their experiences for me to translate into illustrations, and with just 29 responses I had more than enough to close off my survey and start running through them. Printing the answers off I had one night where I sat and read through all my questions and answers about how people viewed the holiday in question, as well as their own experiences with love and companionship. What they thought about love, the colour's that symbolise the feeling of love to them, how love effects them physically and mentally, does it give them butterflies or do they feel warm? Struggle to talk or think when around someone that they're interested in?
I also asked questions at the top of the surveys about the persons age range, sexuality, and current romantic involvement. This was to get real feedback on the people involved to guide the characters I would be involving in my illustrations, it's easy enough for me to come up with some myself but I thought this way I could add another layer of reality for the viewers when they got to see the illustration and try to find their contributions within the art itself, to allow them to find themselves and be entirely involved in the illustrations.
See more here Link
