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What do a railway station, a shopping centre, a library and a Victorian pumping station have in common? It turns out they're all ideal places for drawing! This October, people of all ages came together in hundreds of locations across the world to make their mark as part of The Big Draw Festival.
The Big Draw Festival is a worldwide celebration of drawing and creativity, hosted by arts education charity The Big Draw (that's us!). Every October, organisations big and small, from every sector, run events under the Festival banner. Since launching in 2000, it has brought more than 5 million people back to the drawing board, with events in over 35 countries in the last decade alone. Individuals, schools, museums, care homes, community groups and more use The Big Draw as a platform to reach new audiences and explore drawing and mark-making in all its forms.
The 2026 theme, ‘Make a Mark’, celebrated drawing as a process, exploring the expressive power of mark-making in shaping how we see, think and connect. This year we were delighted to launch the Festival at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, the UK’s only public arts organisation dedicated to illustration. This felt particularly special for us as Quentin Blake is a longstanding Patron of The Big Draw, and has been an integral part of our charity since the very beginning, creating many brilliant illustrations for our past events and even showing up and being part of the action in the early years!
Images: The Big Draw Festival Launch at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. Photo credits: Brandon Few
Over the course of two days, The Big Draw took over the Centre with a wide range of activities for all ages. Marion Deuchars and Thames & Hudson encouraged families to play with colour in Deeney’s Cafe, while Alex Bowie’s collaborative canvas grew throughout the day in the Studio Garden! Joey Yu’s collage workshop sent participants hunting for textures around the site, tearing and layering paper to make landscapes. Gary Andrews led 50 explorers around Clerkenwell on a Walk and Draw, and a surprise pop-up station with Pita Santos had visitors feverishly producing badges at an extraordinary rate all afternoon.
Alongside this there was also a queer-led family drop-in, an evening panel discussion on creativity and social impact, and a creative workshop for college students with Fromm Studio, as well as exhibition tours and storytime and craft sessions for early years. The launch demonstrated that drawing really is for everyone, and we may be biased, but we think it set the tone pretty well for what was to be an incredible month…
Image: The Big Draw Festival Launch at Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. Photo credit: Brandon Few
We’ll start off by telling you about some of the organisations that ran a wide number of activities throughout October (and beyond!). On the Isle of Wight, Quay Arts had a busy month of mark-making, with collaborative collage sessions, life drawing with a dancer performing live in the theatre space, magic water cloths, zine making and more. In Glasgow, The Burrell Collection ran a bustling Big Draw programme alongside ‘Drawing Inspiration’, an exhibition of thirteen works on paper by internationally renowned artists, which continues until 26th November. Families learned about the collection through crafts, music or object handling, while adults could unwind with ‘Stretch and Sketch’ sessions that combined drawing with yoga. Alongside this, The Burrell also ran a month-long online drawing challenge inviting people far and wide to make a mark with daily drawing prompts.
Throughout half-term, London came to life with a number of fantastic Big Draw events, including at Courtauld Gallery, the Wallace Collection and St Paul's Cathedral. At St Paul’s, visitors explored how artists, stonemasons and sculptors have ‘made their mark’ on the building throughout history, with a self-guided trail, hands-on creative activities and the chance to meet the Cathedral’s stonemasons and try their hand at stone carving. The Big Draw team were lucky enough to catch a demo from the stonemasons, and of course we couldn’t leave without experimenting with some air-dry clay…
Meanwhile, The Box, Plymouth, hosted an ‘Imagine the Future’ workshop over a number of days in half-term that invited families to decorate large strips of fabric with drawings of buildings they know around the city, and how they could be changed or improved. Using recycled materials, visitors were able to create their own 3D models to collectively imagine the Plymouth of tomorrow!
Image: University of Wolverhampton
For many organisers, The Big Draw provides the perfect opportunity to bring people together and celebrate the places they know and love. The University of Wolverhampton led a three-day drawing bonanza in the Mander Centre (possibly Wolverhampton’s biggest-ever public drawing project!) with an evolving, large-scale collaborative drawing inspired by the city, its people and its stories. Hundreds of shoppers, families, students and artists contributed, exploring both their physical surroundings and their emotional connections to the place. The Big Draw team dropped by for a visit and were so delighted to see such a wide range of ages taking part, all so completely absorbed in the activity.
The Portland Inn Project CIC brought the community together in Stoke-on-Trent on a wet and windy Saturday with artists Rachael House, Kidda Kinsey and Rebecca Davies, who guided people in making drawings inspired by the local streets, nature and people. The drawings all came together as the ‘Portland Tapestry’, inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry!
Image: The Portland Inn Project. Photo credit: Glen Stoker
Markets were a popular spot for Big Draw events this year! Artist Laura Pearson-Clark ran a spooky Halloween-themed arts and crafts session at Ely Markets, with chalk and crayola drawings filling the square. In South Molton, North Devon Arts’ two-day Big Draw event ‘Make a Mark: All Under One Roof’ was led by artist, Athena Jane Churchill, marking the restoration of the Pannier Market roof (made possible by the Heritage Fund), invited people to draw what they loved about the market. The finished piece, commissioned by South Molton Town Council, captured people, stalls, produce, flying swifts, dogs, sheep, cattle, and more, and will be installed permanently in the the town’s Pannier Market shortly. It is an utterly charming, colourful and joyous celebration of the Pannier Market and its heritage.
We see many Big Draw organisers considering how a community project can produce something that lasts beyond the event itself. Inspire: Culture, Learning & Libraries is a great example, and were in fact highly commended in the Legacy Award at the 2025 Big Draw Festival Awards. For this year’s Festival they ran ‘I Am a Maker’, the fourth strand of their Arts Council England-funded ‘I Am a Creator’ programme. Working with libraries across Nottinghamshire, Inspire brought together five makers to lead workshops for target groups and people who often feel excluded from the arts. The co-created artworks have been brought together to form an exhibition that will now tour in libraries across the county until March 2027.
Images [left]: North Devon Arts. [right]: Braeburn School.
This idea of legacy took on a very literal form at Braeburn School in Nairobi, Kenya, where pupils explored how graffiti and street art leave their mark on the world around us. Alongside turning a space into a Kusama-style dot room and painting using the tracks of their bikes, students worked with guest street artists Bankslave and Nuru to spray-paint the school’s retired bus, ‘Supa Loaf’, transforming it into a roaming artwork! Supa Loaf has now been donated to Rafikistry, where it will begin a new life as a mobile library, carrying books and inspiration to underserved children for years to come. One of the pupils, covered in paint from head to toe, summed it up: “This is the best day of my life!”
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is another excellent example of this. While it remains closed for transformation, the team chose to take the art outside for their Big Draw event, handing visitors paint pens and inviting them to scribble, doodle and design on the building’s hoardings. As a result, the hoardings have become a community canvas, and will remain up for everyone to enjoy until the Barber reopens in late 2027!
Images [left]: Corstorphine & Wright. Photo credit: Brandon Few. [middle & right]: Falmouth University.
The Barber Institute are among many organisers encouraging participants to draw en plein air! Big Draw activities far and wide spilled out onto the streets... Falmouth University ran a range of outdoor activities led by their students over two days, between rain showers, wind and autumn sunshine, including a collaborative panorama drawing that took shape high above the dockyards on Pendennis Rise.
On an unseasonably balmy Sunday in London, architecture firm Corstorphine & Wright hosted a free architectural Walk and Draw with The Big Draw team that encouraged people to draw and explore South Kensington. 55 people joined in to sketch the iconic buildings and surroundings, starting off at Michelin House, before heading on to the V&A and finishing up outside the Natural History Museum.
Monk’s House, National Trust, was also blessed with good weather for its Big Draw activities, all of which took place in the garden. Visitors of all ages and abilities experimented with mark-making, building pictures from found natural forms, and creating still lifes and collaborative marks throughout the month. Monk’s House was one of many National Trust properties across England and Wales taking part, as part of a wider collaboration between The Big Draw and National Trust to help visitors connect with these beautiful spaces in new ways.
Images [left]: National Centre for Writing. [middle & right]: YYC Paper Dress Competition
We’re constantly inspired by the imagination that we see during The Big Draw Festival. The National Centre for Writing turned its Great Hall into an enchanted paper forest threaded by a winding River Wensum, where children and families decorated boats carrying their hopes and wishes and set them afloat past the dragon's lair. In Calgary, Canada, teams of young volunteers turned drawings by elementary school students into wearable works of art using paper and other simple, recycled materials for the first annual YYC Paper Dress Competition!
At Stockton Brook Waterworks in Staffordshire, a magnificent Victorian water pumping station built in 1884 beside the Caldon Canal, visitors spent a weekend adding to a colourful wall of marks, drawing from a nature table in the Engine Hall and joining a range of free workshops with local artists.
Images [left]: Stockton Brook Waterworks. [middle]: Gainsborough's House. [right]: Southeast Community Rail Partnership.
One thing we sometimes hear is “that’s not a drawing”. When we talk about drawing, we mean it in its broadest sense… And our Big Draw organisers certainly embraced this ethos too! Some events explored mark-making using traditional materials, while others experimented with techniques such as drawing with scissors or using found or natural materials. In Reus, Catalonia, artist Elena Detalleres ran three collage-based workshops at the Xavier Amorós Central Library for school groups, staff and families. The Southeast Community Rail Partnership took over Reading Station with free artist-led workshops using natural materials to explore different ways of making marks. And Gainsborough’s House in Suffolk made marks on silk and even used tape to draw on the windows! Hundreds of visitors spent the week building a 360-degree drawing installation with artist Anna Brass, inspired by the gallery’s silk-lined walls and Thomas Gainsborough’s own techniques.
North Hertfordshire College in Hitchin returned to The Big Draw Festival for its fourth year, with volunteer students from across Creative Industries, Travel and Tourism, Education and Early Years, and Hospitality and Catering leading a day of free activities for the local community. Visitors got stuck in with mask making, face painting, sensory bottle making, VR, pizza making and coding with the Library Service, and added to a ‘sculpture garden’ built from re-used cardboard boxes!
In Thailand, Ambassador Education Group was proud to be the country's first-ever Big Draw Festival Partners, launching a series of fun (and at times messy!) activities across multiple campuses. At Unity Concord International School, students moved through cross-curricular stations linking art with nature, music and movement, building a "Living Mark Wall" and translating rhythms into lines. At British Concordance International School, classes collaborated on a massive mural and explored everything from heat-reactive portrait painting to musical motif collages and recycled sculptures.
Image: UCIS, Ambassador Education Group
These are just a handful of the many events that took place far and wide as part of The Big Draw Festival. Every event shows that drawing is something for everyone - it's not limited to a certain age, or to those with specific experience or fancy supplies! Here at The Big Draw we firmly believe that everyone can draw, and that everyone should draw. We’re so grateful to the many Big Draw Organisers who help us to spread that message and bring even more people back to the drawing board. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2027!
Want to take part next year? Find out more here, or contact The Big Draw Team here.
