Helen Roche Art

The hanging of the banners! With councillor Karen Rowland, at Oxford Road Community School; and then up to Wilson Road to hang the second banner. Luckily this was in the morning, before it got super-hot, on Monday July 18th, mid-heatwave.

Ta da! The completed banner design. This is the slightly larger version for Wilson School, whose railings are higher than those at Oxford Road Community School. The two banners are almost identical, but adjusted slightly for the different proportions.

The next stage of the 'Love Your Neighbourhood' project - transforming the drawings into stencil designs. Some took more tweaking than others! For those who are interested in this type of thing: I made the images black and white, and as vector-friendly as possible. Some I did vectorise and save as SVGs, using Inkscape. Others, I reduced to neat black and white, and then let the laser cutter software do the rest; it turns a simple black and white image into a vector line image. The software at the Hackspace is Lightburn, which accomplishes this feat very well. You can then cut the image at whatever size you choose, as long as it fits on the laser cutter bed!
Here are a few of the designs, ready to be cut:

Cutting the stencils: this is where it happens! On the majestic laser cutter at rLab, the Reading Hackspace.

'Love Your Neighbourhood', the designs: in the latter part of our first session at Wilson School (with Year 6 children from both Wilson School and Oxford Road Community School), the children formed into groups of three and designed their own stencils on the theme. I was pleased to see how many of them were thinking about local wildlife - two groups gave me a newt design! Here is just a selection of the drawings I took away to make into stencils.

Love Your Neighbourhood, 1st session.

I took a stack of stencils along to Year 6 at Wilson School, where the Year 6 from Oxford Road Community School joined us. After a slideshow introducing the theme - where I talked about stencils, and what I love about the Oxford Road area - and a video on stencil techniques, the children got to try out the stencils themselves. We used stencils with bridges, stencils without bridges (simple silhouette shapes), and using positive shapes for making prints. The children tried out different media - paint with sponges or brushes, coloured pencils, lines, colour-blending - and produced some really beautiful vibrant images with some great originality. In the last part of the session, they designed their own stencils, and I went away with a large stack of designs, to be scanned, and turned - by the following week - into stencils cut on polypropylene sheet, thanks to the laser cutter at the Reading Hackspace.

'Love Your Neighbourhood' is the theme of a project I have just run with two schools in the Oxford Road (Reading) area. The theme was initially suggested by ROC - ‘Redeeming Our Communities’, who held an ROC Conversation event locally, last November. https://roc.uk.com/roc-conversation/
Via ROC, I was offered material costs for this project, funded by Reading Borough Council - many thanks to Sarah Gardener at RBC.
The children who took part are the Year 6 children from Oxford Road Community School, and Wilson School. The end result is two large vinyl banners, one for each school, which will be hung on the railings of the schools. Here’s a sneak preview - and in my next few posts, I’ll explain the process! The children made the final artworks using stencils they had designed themselves, inspired by the area they live in. I can’t wait to see the banners hung up on Monday morning.

Pomegranate, stencil design, 2021

Trilobite, stencil and print.