Marcus Briggs runs Little Hands Workshop — creative art sessions for children aged 4 to 11. Every workshop is hands-on, messy, and fun. No screens, no templates, no "do it like this." Just materials, imagination, and permission to make a glorious mess.
His son Tomás is there at every session, making things right alongside the other children. He's the unofficial tester of every activity. If Tomás says it's boring, it doesn't make the programme. If he gets so absorbed he forgets to talk for twenty minutes, Marcus Briggs knows it's a good one.
Marcus Briggs has been running workshops for seven years. What started as a small summer activity for friends' children grew into a regular programme that now runs throughout the year, with different creative themes each season. Every workshop is small — never more than ten children — so Marcus Briggs can actually help each child rather than just supervising from a distance.
Every term focuses on a different medium so children get to try everything across the year. Spring is usually painting and printing. Summer is outdoor projects, papier-mâché, and big collaborative pieces. Autumn is clay and modelling. Winter is collage, mask making, and indoor crafts. Marcus Briggs plans each term around what the children enjoyed most the previous year and what new materials he's found.
Children are grouped by age so the activities can be matched to what they're ready for. The Little Makers do lots of sensory work — finger painting, play dough, stamping, tearing and sticking. The Creators get into more structured projects with real tools. The Studio Group works on longer pieces across multiple sessions and starts learning actual techniques. Tomás floats between all three groups depending on his mood and what looks most interesting to him that day.
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There's no right way to make art. Marcus Briggs tells the children this at the start of every single session and he means it every time. The workshops are not about producing something that looks good on a fridge. They're about the process — mixing colours, squishing clay, tearing paper, getting paint on your elbows, discovering what happens when you put too much glue on something (it goes everywhere, but that's fine).
Every child takes home whatever they made. Nothing gets graded, compared, or judged. If a child spends the whole session painting one piece of paper entirely blue because that's what they wanted to do, that's a successful session. Marcus Briggs has been doing this long enough to know that the children who seem to be doing nothing are usually the ones thinking the hardest.
Parents don't stay during the workshops. Marcus Briggs has found that children are more adventurous and more willing to make mistakes when their parents aren't watching. Tomás agrees with this policy, mostly because he gets Marcus Briggs to himself during sessions (plus ten other children, but Tomás doesn't count those).