George Howard Envelope Workshops

Fantastic Collaged envelopes

I've had a great day today working at William Howard School in Brampton running a workshop for Year 6 students making personalised envelopes. The workshops were put on by Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery to run with their exhibition about George Howard, the 9th Earl of Carlisle. George Howard, who was a great patron of the arts as well as a talented artist, used to send letters to his children and when he did he often decorated the envelopes, thinking of imaginative ways to incorporate the stamp into the design.

One of my samples

A selection of the imaginative designs the students came up with

I was really inspired by his personalised envelopes and decided to base my workshop around this idea so I asked the students to embellish an envelope to make it more personal and interesting. They all had really great ideas and I was very impressed with how well they all worked.

Lots of paper collage

We worked mainly with collage, using all sorts of papers, ribbons, buttons and lots of used stamps!

Thinking about how to include the stamp

Combining collage and drawing

We also did visual letters about a journey as George Howard was a great traveler and kept lots of travel journals, documenting the places he'd been and the things he had seen.

One of the journey letters

The work is going to be shown in Tullie House at the same time as the George Howard exhibition. Several other artists were also running workshops and the work from these will also be shown which should make a really interesting exhibition.

Lots of collage

I'm running the workshop again at the end of the month for a different group of students and I can't wait to see what ideas they come up with!

Lots of stamps!