Get creative, stay focussed

FREELANCE

Illustrator

and arts educator Alex Abel helped a dozen Yorkshire & Humberside members explore doodling as a mindful way to relax in an online session during Learning at Work Week in May.

It was a change of role for Alex, as she’d often been a UNISON learner herself when she was working in the third sector, before she went freelance at the end of last year.

“My aim was to help people who don’t necessarily consider themselves artistic see how doodling is quite relaxing and can help them concentrate and focus in meetings,” Alex explains.

“I often doodle in meetings and I’m not being rude – it’s something that keeps your hands busy, calms you and helps you take in the information more effectively.”

With a degree in Educational Media Design, Alex understands the psychology of learning through visuals and memory tools.

“Being able to draw in meetings has always benefited me,” she says. “I’ve put my notes up on noticeboards after meetings so people can see what we’ve talked about, and drawing is a great way to make a meeting memorable – notes often stay up to be referred to.”

Alex co-led the session with local artist and frequent collaborator Zeke Clough, and their rapport with each other helped create a relaxed and informal environment.

“We’re good friends who can chatter on among ourselves while we’re working,” she says. “It means you don’t have an hour of silence while people are drawing by themselves.”

One key message Alex emphasised at the beginning was that participants needn’t worry about getting anything ‘wrong’.

“The big thing was there are no mistakes,” she says. “Right at the beginning, we were saying if anything feels like it ‘goes wrong’, we’ll work it into what you’re doing. There isn’t anything you can do wrong, just different – and that’s a nice message for everyone.”

To warm up, Alex asked everyone how they were feeling while Zeke drew faces representing those emotions onscreen.

Alex divided the rest of the session into three main activities:

✱ mandala drawing

✱ mirroring and repeating patterns

✱ working with circles.

To finish, Alex asked everyone to draw an outline of their head in profile and fill the space in the head with all the words describing everything on their minds.

She and Zeke drew all the head words on a shared screen to represent all the many things going on for participants. And then they suggested everyone prioritised the four things that were most important to them.

“That was a nice mental health activity to finish on – a nice way to work out how you can reduce the stress in your day,” Alex says.

The participants enjoyed the session, says Regional Learning and Development Organiser Rose Bent. “The feedback was very positive – I think everyone enjoyed doing something different and something that helped with stress as well,” she says.

To follow on, Alex led a second online session in September called Learn To Draw, where she showed participants how to progress from drawing a simple cat in a box to creating a face and then a face and a figure in proportion. ✱