At Bold Creative, we are all really excited to be involved in The Day Project. The team took their first step towards creating the ground breaking graphic novel last week.

We worked with a small group to start collecting stories of their experiences of HIV. Everyone stepped up to the challenge bravely as they interviewed each other about major points in their lives affected by the condition, from taking medication, to chatting up girls, to explaining the situation to family members…

Read ALL about the project, keep up to date, and have the opportunity to get involved here http://thedayproject.org.uk/

At Bold Creative we have 3 Key values.

Smarter not Harder

People

Adventure.

Every Friday we have a Values session, where we do an activity that helps strengthen those key bold creative values.

This week, we went rock climbing in Mile End!

Martin & Greg are seasoned Pro’s so they showed us the ropes, quite literally!

It strengthened our sense of adventure, especially for the first timers, and we got more confident throughout the session, as well as teaching us something new it was a lot of fun!

Trusting each other to help on the belaying, was good for the people values too!

That is a picture of Kweku, who’s doing work experience with us at the moment, pretty adventurous!!

We were back at Body and Soul again this Thursday for our second workshop!

Ben got the group to start thinking about their characters.

Last week he asked all the kids to bring in something they felt resembled their character, or something that was important to them!

We had a mixed response from the guys that remembered, from fried chicken, through 1920s art deco lamps, to the Justin Burber album, and Ben’s dragonball z wallet!!

Once we had gone round and asked all the guys about their things, it was time to start some actual drawing!!

Ben had brought in a bunch of illustrations, some of his own work, and  a collection of children’s books, to get the guys thinking about the style possibilities when coming up with a character.

Using this and the object for inspiration, they had to start to create a character of themselves.

The results were extremely varied, one massive afro, a grandma’s cardigan, a foxes mask, a chicken bone in the head.

In general we were impressed with how the guys got stuck in to the drawing and really enjoyed themselves!

Finally, after they had finished doing their own characters they passed them around and the guys had to have a go at interpreting what other people had drawn of themselves in their own styles!

This was another amusing game and helped understand different styles and gave the opportunity to add extra characteristics you felt they left, which could be anything from a saying to an extra arm borrowed from an octopus!

We had a ton of fun again and look forward to going back again this Thursday!!

A couple of weeks ago me and a few of the guys from bold went down to the Mile End Community Project to get them involved with Adobe Youth Voices an exciting new project that enables young people to express their ideas and creative flare through using Adobe software. The great thing for us and Adobe is that all the lads that hang out there already have brought there creative minds together to come up with ‘HOODFORTS’.

And for all you readers that are unaware of what ‘hoodforts’ is, check out the Video from the session;

(video coming soon)

So as you can see it was a very inspirational and creative session, making all the initial steps to creating a Promo film, Poster, and Hoodie design all based around the concept of ‘HOODFORTS’…

With loads more to come from the lads in the over christmas and in the new year!