Illustration – Art with a Job to Do

When researching our Hidden Art project, we realised that several of our artists were illustrators and this led to our second project, Illustration – Art With a Job to Do. Our purpose was to engage Barnsley people in exploring and appreciating the talents and work of Barnsley artists who work or worked as illustrators. We planned to give people more direct contact with the artists and their works and to encourage them to use their own talents, perhaps aspiring to a career in illustration too.

Early in our project we visited the House of Illustration, a gallery in London with educational objectives, to try to understand our subject better. We learned that Illustration can be defined as ‘Art with a job to do’. They had unwittingly given us a title for our project. Illustration can include books especially children’s books, information boards, pub and other signs, posters, greetings cards, illustrations of local buildings or landscape, road signs, cartoons, manga, comics, digital animation, and much more. It can entertain, inspire, inform and promote.

We provided a series of workshops and events about illustration. We worked again with Barnsley Adult Skills and Community Learning Service and local illustrator Gill Tyler to provide a workshop in which those who attended created and printed their own wonderful linocuts.

We were able to provide a stall at the Worsborough Country Fair in 2017 during which we exhibited illustration work, ran competitions with children and drew
portraits of children who asked for them.

With Worsborough History Society in 2018 we gave a presentation about past and present local illustrators and their work and provided several sessions in
which we supported them to complete their own illustrations of the local area.

We sought funding to undertake a more developed project which was to provide illustration training workshops supported by professional illustrators and was to have ended in a two day exhibition of illustrations in Barnsley but unfortunately we were not successful and we were not able to bring our ideas to fruition.

We would like to give our thanks to the professional Barnsley illustrators Gill Tyler, Paul Morton and Richard Butterfield who worked with us to develop our
proposals.