How to get noticed when you run a cartoon art workshop.

Over the summer of 2019, Walthamstow hosted its art festival, The E17 Art Trail 2019. Every two years this colossal festival with its 205 venues and 8,500 participants is a great opportunity for all artists to showcase their work and run community-based workshops for the community.

I wanted to help the community learn new skills. Running free workshops in a public space allowed me to do this.

Community-based workshops are a great way for members of the public to take part and learn about a particular project, learn new skills and methods with a tutor. When I hosted a Cartoon Art Workshop for the E17 Art Trail 2019, at The Walthamstow Central Library, I learnt some new skills, too.

Hosting the Cartoon Art Workshop taught me the following skills:

1. Hard work is motivating and inspiring. It gives you an edge and makes you stand out and get noticed.

2. I learnt more self-discipline and focus, thus becoming more efficient and productive.

3. When I saw children create some artwork using my step-by-step drawing templates, they had accomplished something amazing, and at the same time, I realised the hard work behind my workshops were becoming successful.

4. News spread of the success of my workshops. Amazing results and word-of-mouth brought new participants. Primary schoolchildren attended each and every day of the week.

5. Weekends were 'open-house', where the workshops ran for six hours. As they were immensely popular, I ensured I had some volunteers on hand to help me with the logistics.

6. Hard work made me stand out even more. Before long, both the Festival Directors attended with the Festival Sponsors of the E17 Art Trail, to see how a modern-day workshop worked well in a bricks-and-mortar library. I featured in the sponsors' global magazine, BDS (Bibliographic Data Services) Life for Libraries (Autumn 2019)...see pictures, below.

7. I took a lot of satisfaction from my accomplishments. After two weeks of the E17 Art Trail 2019, the Cartoon Art Workshop had amassed over seven hundred photographs of participants' artwork.