Alex Abel

Alex has been an artist professionally since 1993 but art has helped her through all stages of education and life. It has been important for Alex to learn new skills, make new friends and support her own health and wellbeing.

Alex’s degree was in Educational Media Design and this helps Alex to design original courses by understanding both the creative process and the psychology of learning, and so how to support each learner to get the best outcomes. Alex has worked with hard-to-reach groups and with mental health support to develop courses that provide distraction and creative learning through fun. She has brought art courses to libraries, museums, schools, charities, colleges, universities and youth groups around West Yorkshire.

In her own freelance work, Alex creates bespoke artwork and drawn digital content illustrations (both on paper and I-Pad) that are not commercially available. Often, they are one-off artworks or personal ideas that people would like translating to visual. Alex creates the artwork from drawn sketches and research; mainly using Procreate and Adobe Suite/Affinity Software. She likes mixing media such as drawn illustrations, photos and digi-art.

Alex also likes art/drawing as a very effective communication tool and has recently been training and delivering Graphic Facilitation note taking in meetings and group presentations. This works for any age and the digital files also look great on social media and websites.

Pictures are very effective for communication and are often more effective than words in a quick moving situation. Our brains find images compelling and memorable, Alex is developing this further at the moment with online courses and work with the local charity sector.

Fun fact about imparting information orally: after 72 hours we will remember about 10% of what we heard, add a picture and this reaches 65%!