Heartlands Urban Festival

Summer is over and just before we plunge headfirst into the depths of winter I need to crank up the blog. Stand back!

First up: Heartlands Urban Festival

Such a busy weekend with stacks going on like DJs, mini ramps, street skate section, tons of walls to paint on, bands, dance groups and tons more.

From West Briton: Article

Photo Stuart Burton: "Thank you so much for taking the time to teach my boys how to write with aerosols. You really gave them a day they'll never forget."

Photo Stuart Burton

The Edusk8 crew do another bit on the wall

And this time, it's personal!

This week the Edusk8 crew got to do the second session of the big front wall at Mount Hawke Skate Park in Cornwall. To read about the first session and Edusk8 at Mount Hawke click here.

We took a slightly different approach this time. To warm up, we doodled. Ten of us drew whatever we felt like drawing, with a variety of marker pens, on our own sheets of card for well over an hour. Amazingly, most of this was in complete silence. They needed hardly any prompting.

We wanted to create something that had a peice of it created by each of us. And we came up with an idea for a totem pole-type image. or a totem pile, as someone suggested.

So we played the surrealist's game Exquisite Corpse with a theme of a totem pole, but with ten pictures rotating round the table simultaneously.

Then we all chose our favourite peice from the ten finished pictures and stuck them together so we each had designed a peice of the image.

After some lunch, we went out into the bright sunshine (and the hottest car park in the history of mankind!) and painted it on the wall.

Edusk8 crew kick-start giant wall project!

Mount Hawke Skatepark outside walls, Day 1: Edusk8...

Part of the secret of Mount Hawke's success is the education facilities. The world famous rural Cornish skatepark has a great set-up for young people, who would otherwise not be in education, employment or training of any kind. They call this side of the skatepark 'Edusk8'.

This year I will be helping various groups of people who use the skatepark to decorate the massive blue wall in the front car park. The Edusk8 crew went first and his project leapt into action on Tuesday this week.

We had mammoth doodle collaborations in the conference room first and then went out and continued on the wall. Everybody who was there took part and many had never used spray paint before and quite a few were telling me they couldn't draw when we started.

We got so much done in one day. I was amazed at how fast everybody worked!