Website and animations for DrawingOut: Invisible Diseases

DrawingOut: Invisible Diseases was created by Academics at the Cardiff School of Psychology and the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, and is a technique for working with patient groups to communicate their experiences of socially invisible diseases through art. DrawingOut enables patients to overcome cultural and/or language barriers and express thoughts and  feelings on sensitive or taboo subjects.

We worked with the project team make to build a website that made these tools available to healthcare professionals who run workshops with patient groups, and individuals who might be unable to attend workshops.

We created a WordPress website that acts as a fully self-contained toolkit to allow anyone to run or participate in the project, and to and share their experiences and artwork.

The animations were key to this project to demonstrate the drawing exercises, which begin with some general warm-up exercises in order to build up people’s confidence and skills, and then lead them to draw things that are more directly related to their disease experience. The aim was to encourage people to rediscover the joy of drawing that they may have experienced as a child, and not worry too much about how ‘good’ the drawings are. Working through these exercises step by step, eventually leads to creating a final piece which can be shared on the site gallery. The site currently features over 100 artworks.