African Village Scenes

This lesson was inspired by a hand-made card I received in Malawi. We looked at how quite a lot of African art looks stylised rather than realistic and created these pictures using oil pastel. The main focus was on blending the pastels and adding tone.

Mixed Media Illustrations

I was very fortunate to have illustrator and children's author, Petr Horacek, visit my class again this year. Children of all ages love his stories and the wonderful pictures.

Petr explained how he uses mixed media, collage, drawing and printing to create his illustrations. He demonstrated how to mix different crayons to make the colours brighter and better, how to draw one of his characters (Elephant!), and how to create an illustration using collage. He also talked about how he develops his books and gets them published.

While Petr was with us, all of the children made their own 'Elephant' collages using their imaginations - what would Elephant look like jumping into a pool or dancing at a disco?

The next week we needed to make winter-themed art so we took our inspiration from more of Petr's pictures. The children made painted paper for the sky, sea and island/iceberg, painted the moon, drew and coloured animals with pencils or pastels, glued it all together and added the reflection with chalk for a final touch! They didn't turn out quite as I had anticipated but the children certainly learned a lot and, as you can see below, the pictures were quite cute.

I would definitely recommend Petr Horacek's books and a visit his website!

Notan Squares

Here's an idea I saw on a couple of other blogs, notably here at Dali's Moustache and here at Art with Mr Hall. We had done quite a lot of work on light and dark - tints and shades, adding tone - but this lesson was about balance and contrast of light and dark in the composition. We were also about to study light in science and it was a theme in our class novel - I love it when things all fit together!

This was also a great lesson for cutting and pasting skills... Some were able to go for more complex patterns (like the first example here), whereas others found it challenging enough to cut a simple shape from each side! I thought about using colour but decided in the end to stick with the stark contrast of the black and white.

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!

Carol Singers

It may only be September but my class were designing Christmas cards. As ridiculously early as it may seem, the designs needed to be done now so that parents could make orders and cards could be printed in time for Christmas.

When I spotted a these collage carol singers, I knew they would look great when printed and just had to try them! I saw the idea on Deep Space Sparkle but it came from the blog Plastiquem.

I didn't give the children a lot of help with shapes and sizes so the results were quite varied. Some had more difficulty drawing and cutting suitable shapes than I had anticipated! Nevertheless these will still make great cards. We splattered white paint over the background for snow as a finishing touch.