“Ethnography: You are the research” | JPF and Paul Cope
In which I meet for the very first time Dr Paul Cope, and we make a bit of art together.

You can watch us drawing, here:
In which I meet for the very first time Dr Paul Cope, and we make a bit of art together.
You can watch us drawing, here:
Second of our collaborations using Google Streetview to picture the plague of 1665.
You can watch us drawing, here:
Joel, or Joe, has been painting outside. We incorporated that into this picture, which also pays homage to the celebrated photo of the band, Queen.
You can watch us drawing, here:
My turn today. I chose to illustrate a quote from Samuel Pepys, in the Great Plague.
Viv wanted to draw the final scene in her memoir, a very funny book about (among other things) keeping goats.
This picture shows Viv (right) with her daughter in a disappointing cafe in the Hebrides, drinking yucky coffee:
Tech failure means I have no video this time, and am struggling to format the audio so that WordPress allows me to embed it. I hope to fix this!
Cath said she’s no good at visual art. She wanted to use our collaboration to get clearer ideas about a scene in a book.
We used drawing to work out who was in the room, and what was in there with them – then to use the “props” to develop her narrative. Bear in mind that we started with a blank page. This is what we finished with.
You can watch our process, and maybe pick up some tips about how drawing can help your writing, in the video recording:
Afterwards, Cath sent this message:
Hi JP, great to see you (on Zoom) again. I really enjoyed it. What a fresh way to unblock writers block- by having fun!
We decorated one of the sketches I made while training in impro with Keith Johnstone. It was just a line drawing, with the three “lifebelts” listed on the top right.
Joel used his iPad today for the first time. And to raise the stakes a bit we recorded it live to Facebook. I have no idea what people watching might have made of the sight of us drawing – the picture itself never appeared on screen.
At one point, as I was drawing the splashes and the big wave, I lost Joel for a bit and had to talk to myself.
Today’s session was not recorded on video. Sorry about that. The full picture can be seen below.
We started by familiarising ourselves with Aggie.io, the online drawing tool thingy.
We made a few marks, most of which subsequently got hidden or deleted. And we settled on courage as our theme.
My dog Peanut inspired us to start. We created the wolf as a scary counterpoint, and devised a short dialogue.
Anna suggested that the wolf might even eat the sun itself, which greatly ramped up the scariness.
Quite a bit of mark-making got erased or undone, until towards the end, when the ticking of the clock required us to make marks and add colourful decorative elements in haste, without worrying if they were “good” or not.
We finished on time (of course).
Thank you Anna M.
Joel’s been doing a lot of work with traffic lights. We made that our theme.
With apologies to Alamy, whose stock photo we plonked in here.
It was my idea to use today’s session to design a mug.
I wanted it to include five roundels, giving something different to look at from every angle. And I wanted decorative elements from traditional chinaware – dots, and fleur de lys.
I thought at first it might be blue-and-white china, as this 30 second taster from our session shows:
You may be wondering what papier-mache things Joel is talking about. I’ll post something about those soon.
As you have seen already, in the picture at the top, my blue-and-white idea didn’t work out.
To see how we ended up with the yellow-on-red cherubs, which Joel previously put on a tea towel he designed, and why there are coloured circles within circles over Joel’s mountain painting, you’ll need to watch the whole video:
Special edition mug designed by John-Paul Flintoff and Joel Levack.