Week 8 with the busy Yr 3-4's

During this week the budding artists have stayed within the theme of ‘insects’ and are now exploring the environment in which these creatures live.  They have been able to choose their own insect so we now have fabulous drawings of ants, butterflies and ladybugs. 

I have spent the early part of the week building on the students drawing abilities.  We talked about how we can make our pencil ‘whisper’, ‘shout’, ‘talk’ and even ‘laugh’!  We even learnt about how to actually ‘hold’ a pencil when we draw...

Looking carefully at our collection of items that reflect the environment our insects live in. 

Zhara 'holding' her pencil and using her whole arm.

Gigi making some fabulous marks.

Charlize drawing her ant and holding her pencil on top in order to obtain full arm motion.

Once we had drawn our sticks, leaves etc we cut them out and then worked on our composition.  We were able to develop our composition based on our research drawings.  Next we used this drawing as our reference point to plot where we will place our dye for our backgrounds.  

Monica starting to glue down her composition. 

Charlize also at the gluing stage.

Orlando carefully cutting out his shapes.

Alyssa and Zhara cutting out their images.

Gigi playing round with her shapes to find the best composition.  

Monica and her final composition ready for the dying stage.

Alyssa's final composition

The students really enjoyed dying their shapes in - there were many colours to choose from and they needed to carefully refer back to their reference drawings to correctly plot everything.

Charlize dying her shapes.

Then we explored different patterns – from basic shapes to more cultural symbols.  These will now be applied with vivid on top of the dye shapes.  These are starting to look fantastic!

Monica looking at 'hiapo' for inspiration

Zhara working with her vivids

Orlando enjoying the challenge

The girls hard at work designing their patterns

Iroam creating his own patterns.