Creative North

Drawing is a fantastic tool for creative and entrepreneurial thinking. Enterprise animator, Jane Shaw and illustrator Bethan Laker will bring together their respective skills to help you illuminate your route to the enterprise world you’d like to build.

You’ll be encouraged to bring your vision alive and into focus by playfully re-imagining it as a tangible representation that vividly captures your goals and aspirations. You’ll be illustrating from the get-go and creating an illustrated guide to your practice to take away with you as a tool to plan your future. We’ll explore how you can use this imagery to ensure that you channel your energies in the activities which will help you realise your ultimate goal.

This workshop is FREE but places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

Ushaw is truly one of the hidden jewels in Durham’s crown and is quickly establishing itself as a fantastic new centre of contemporary creative practice with studio and exhibition space.

Ushaw’s stunning Chapels, Refectory, Exhibition Hall & Parlour are must see attractions in their own right and the unique and tranquil atmosphere of Ushaw makes it a remarkable and incomparable place that visitors will want to return to time and time again.

Lucy Jenkins, Ushaw’s Visual Arts Officer, and Jonathan Ward, its Commercial Manager, are keen to explore with artists, performers, designer-makers and participatory artists how they can contribute to Ushaw’s programme of activities and its offerings to the commercial benefit of all.

Enterprise animator, Jane Shaw, will facilitate an informal Q&A session where you will gain valuable insights into Ushaw’s audiences and how to develop products and services with these in mind. To get your creative juices flowing, Jane will also introduce some lively ideas generation activities. The workshop will conclude with an opportunity to tour the site and view the new artists’ studios.

This workshop is FREE but places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

We’re delighted to have teamed up with Natalie Querol from Arts Council England to uncover the mysteries of applying for Arts Council England Funding.

Natalie will share her considerable experience of Arts Council Funding, both as an Arts Council England Relationship Manager with responsibility for appraising applications and as an arts practitioner making applications on her own behalf. Natalie will provide an overview of current funding agendas and buzzwords and then focus on Arts Council England’s grants using examples of successful applications as a basis for some practical work in completing an application.

Natalie is based in the Newcastle office of Arts Council England. Her role includes monitoring National Portfolio Organisations, appraising grant applications and providing advice to potential applicants. Prior to joining Arts Council England in 2016, Natalie worked as an independent theatre producer and project manager in the North East and nationally for 18 years. She set up The Empty Space is 2007 to support a thriving independent theatre sector in the North East and beyond, and continues to run the company today in the half of the week when she’s not at ACE.

This workshop is FREE but places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

The enthusiasm that creative people have for sharing and showing their work sometimes means that the financial decisions they make leaves them out of pocket.

A handful of key financial ideas can ensure that you don’t fall into this trap and we’ll explore:

• setting a daily or hourly rate, using your own work as the starting point
• unravel the knotty issue of how to value your artworks for sale
• the unit costs of making goods and running workshops
• creating budgets for funding applications
• measures of profit

We’ll assume no prior knowledge in building your understanding of key financial concepts to the point where you’ll feel confident of your ability to manage your resources, measure your profits, and use financial information to inform your decision making.

Facilitator Jane Shaw has years of experience of costing and pricing and will show examples of successful financial pitches for arts funding and commissions.

This workshop is FREE but places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

Artists, makers, performers – all need to people who will pay for their work if they are to sustain their practice.

The market for creative work is diverse and so trying to sell to everybody is bad business practice: some customers are more valuable than others and, in this workshop, you’ll develop strategies to find them, including those that you may not have recognised before.

Meeting customer needs is the key to generating sales and we’ll put you into their shoes to help you see the benefits you offer from their perspective. We’ll look at:

• the dos and don’ts of selling
• defining your unique selling proposition
• developing your advertising campaign
• product and service placement
• the principles and techniques of visual merchandising
• pricing your work
• routes to market
• what people are really buying when they make a purchase!

This workshop is FREE but places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.

In conjunction with Lucy Jenkins, Visual Arts Manager for County Durham, Durham Creatives is delighted to host a professional development workshop specifically designed for visual artists wishing to develop their understanding of how to curate shows and make the most of exhibition opportunities.

Lucy has over twenty years’ experience as an art curator who has worked in a range of settings including Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University, Leicestershire Museums and Art Galleries, the National Portrait Gallery, and Bolton Museum and Art Gallery. In her role as curator of the Hatton Gallery, Lucy led strategic change in developing the exhibition programme and the education and learning programme. This work saw an increase in gallery visitors from 32,000 to 50,000.

Lucy will share her curatorial experience to help you to:

• Conceptualise your exhibition with different audiences in mind
• Make the most of exhibition spaces and the resources available to you
• Identify potential technical issues that you might encounter
• Consider a variety of approaches to interpreting your work
• Plan your private view
• Devise a range of measures to help you gauge the impact that your exhibition has had on your audience.

If a friend came to you with a bright idea for a creative business and asked you to invest your time, money and energy into it, what questions would you ask before getting involved?

In this workshop we will identify the various elements of the business planning process that will clarify our ideas and prove invaluable in taking them forward.

We’ll take a look at contents and structure of a range of model business plans and explore how creative entrepreneurs use the process to make the most of their talents, exploit opportunities and achieve commercial success. Using self-assessment profiling tools, you will explore your own potential to be enterprising and at look at how your existing skills can be harnessed and developed to put your ideas into action.

By the end of this session you will have drafted your own business progression plan.

This workshop will be delivered by Jane Shaw, a former dancer and a business starter with an MA in Entrepreneurship, who has been helping creative people start businesses for many years. Jane regards developing a business as being a creative process in its own right, where fresh ideas are at the heart of every successful enterprise and a little ‘sideways thinking’ can make fantastic things can happen.

This workshop is FREE but places are limited so book early to avoid disappointment.