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On Tuesday, 3 May, Agent 4 Change Layla shared her artistic flair with young people from the children’s charity, NCH, in Coventry.

The young people who came to the session live with varying difficulties and NCH workers, Jane and Karen, support the young people to discover their potential.

Through their services, NCH support some of the region's most vulnerable and excluded children and young people.

Batik isn’t an art form we were all familiar with on meeting with Layla. Batik is a way of decorating cloth using wax and dye. Wax is applied to cloth using a special instrument called a tjanting or by using a brush.

Painting cloth

Dye is then painted onto the cloth and the white wax acts as a barrier so that the design stands out from the coloured dye – the effect looks brilliant.

Painting in between the wax mould

The activity was card making, though they can easily can be made into a wall hanging, and it was important for the young people to personalise their batik templates, rather than restricting to a set design.

Art has a therapeutic quality and the young people seemed to relax into the quality of the activity.

Designing templates

It was then time to have a practice using the hot wax and the tjanting to go over the outline of the template, which was placed underneath the cloth.

Layla showed us how to do this - her hand movements with the tjanting were so silky and quick, we looked on in amazement! It’s quite tricky to acquire the movement Layla has developed, but the young people surprised themselves with how quickly they got to grips with the tjanting!

After a few tries, we had wax outlines of butterflies, initials, flowers and the like! It was then time to paint, and use the amazing rich coloured dyes Layla had brought.

It was a very creative activity, painting within the wax design and combining colours on the textured cloth.

Once dried, we trimmed around the cloth to make a nice fitting for the brightly coloured frames – the finished products just looked great!

The finishing stages

On her experience of facilitating this workshop Layla told me: "I had a great time working with the young people. I really enjoy sharing and demonstrating this exciting medium and it's nice to introduce participants to traditional batik tools and methods. We created lovely some colourful batiks on a grey, drizzly day in Coventry!"

When asked who they were going to send the card to, one young person said to me: "I'm going to keep it for good memories."

This touched us all. Using your talent or simply giving some of your time to be with a young person can really leave a positive lasting impression

If you fancy becoming a creative Agent 4 Change, please give the BBC Coventry & Warwickshire Action Desk a call on: 0845 900 5 300