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!
The Year 3 & 4’s are a hardworking group of enthusiastic artists. They too have been learning the importance of maintaining a workbook. In their workbooks they have been recording images that are important to them, from super cool motor bikes, cars and superheroes to princesses, flowers and fashion.
In our first lesson we brainstormed ‘what is an
artist?’ Here are their interesting initial
responses....
Their drawing assignment was to observe carefully some
insects. We narrowed this down to
cicadas as the children were finding their shed shells out on the trees in the
playground.
They had to observe very carefully what they saw in front of
them – not what they thought it should look like! We counted the legs and we had to make sure
our cicada had 6 legs, and 3 body parts, the head, thorax and abdomen.
We discussed shading with our pencils and practised this in
our workbooks. We then moved to our
large sheets of paper and carefully drew from our research drawings. We then added coloured pencil.
Iroam's insect at the coloured pencil stage
Next we went over the outlines with vivid to bring out the
detail – especially in the wings.
Lastly we added the dye to bring out the background.
