More Op Art

Last time I taught op art was a couple of years ago. My current group have been studying light and sight in science so it seemed a perfect time to teach about it again!

There were loads of ideas I wanted to try but we just had time for the line 'tornado' op art (which I wrote about last time here) and a collaborative project using one-point perspective. It was a different design to last time but also a design I found on-line. Unfortunately it was a picture someone had 'pinned' and I had no luck tracing where the original came from! We also looked at op art on the Smartboard.

Anyway, I drew most of the design in pencil, explained it to the kids and they finished the pencil part and did the colouring in whenever they had a spare moment.

They all looooved op art! They were drawing their own designs at home, bringing in books, pictures they'd found... So we even wrote reports about the history of op art (this fun Bridget Riley video clip from the BBC helped).

Starry Night

As we'd been studying space in science, it seemed a good time to look at a famous painting of the night sky! 

To start off we discussed the painting, thinking especially about how Van Gogh portrayed movement. To help with this, we compared the painting to a photo of star trails and also watched this mesmerising interactive Starry Night (which I came across on Deep Space Sparkle).

We also learned more about Vincent Van Gogh, starting from this fun BBC video clip.

The pictures were made with oil pastels, first drawing black outlines for the 'mountain', hills and buildings, then adding colours to those parts and finally completing the sky. We built up a mix of colours using lines, trying to follow the same direction to achieve a flowing effect.

In the first lesson I thought, 'Agghhh I never knew hills could be so hard to draw!!' but by the end every child had produced a beautiful, and surprisingly individual, piece of art.

Gingerbread Cottages

Once upon a time in the heart of a dark, dark wood there was a little cottage... and when the children learned that they were going to make their own little cottage they were super excited!

This wasn't an art lesson (in fact it was mostly a maths lesson as we talked a lot about weighing ingredients and measuring for making the dough) but it was very creative. They worked in groups to make the dough and the next day they cut out their pieces to be baked. Of course the highlight was later that day when they got to build their houses with copious amounts of icing and sweets!

It was a little bit on the stressful side getting twenty little gingerbread cottages to stay standing (especially as, in spite of demonstrations and reminders, most started off spreading icing across biscuits like butter on toast - sometimes not even putting it where the pieces would join together!). We got there in the end and all had lots of fun in the process!