My first workshop. A step into the unknown; not knowing who would turn up or how the final painting would turn out. Fortunately I had great support from Sachiko and Atsuko Shintani and Natsuko Funakoshi at all stages from planning, getting hold of materials and translating.

As a local artist I had been asked to hold a workshop at the annual Ebisu Bunkasai (culture festival) The idea was to present some of my own paintings then work with the children to collaboratievly produce a large landscape painting of Ebisu.

The workshop was aimed at elementary school age children. There was a reasonable turnout of children accompanied by parents and grandparents who were happy to join in.

After a brief outline of the workshop plan and presentation of my work I elicited some features of the surrounding landscape by drawing pictures on the whiteboard. We then asked children and adults, in groups, to draw small pictures of as many things that they could remember seeing on their way to the workshop that day. After a few minutes we collected the ideas together, writing ideas on the whiteboard. We explained that we would have to divide up the words between the groups to ensure that we could include everything in the final picture. We then asked groups to choose at least two words to draw until they were all taken. We outlined a few guides for the drawings such as using all of the space on the paper and avoiding too much time consuming detail then set everyone off drawing. We stopped everyone after about thirty minutes then started cutting out the pictures and glueing them onto the canvas. when all of the drawings had been stuck on we demonstrated that all of the blank canvas needed to be filled. There was some creative use of the rollers to paint roads and railway lines and a few embelisments to the sky such as a rainbow and UFU.

I was pleased to see how the final image worked out.