This week, our collaborative art project based on the theme of community was celebrated in our display in the ‘Learning for Life’ tent at the Westmorland County Show’.
Huge thanks to the Michelle Jurd Trust for making this incredible opportunity possible for our all our pupils and to local artist, Sophie Martin, for helping us to develop our skills and experience art in the outdoors on such an exciting project.
Years 5 + 6 have been exploring different techniques used by different artists to create movement, fluidity and texture in the landscape taking inspiration from our local area, and particularly our recent visit to Ullswater.
We have taken a closer look at mark making by Vincent Van Gogh and watercolours by William Heaton Cooper.
Class 2 have been learning about shape, line and proportion through portraiture. They have explored facial details using a range of media taking inspiration from other artists.
After exploring the work of Guiseppe Arcimboldo who created portraits of people using images of fruits and vegetables, we have created our own fruity faces!
Class 3 have been enjoying experimenting with colour, shape and pattern through the incredible work of French artist Henri Rousseau. His work reminds us of the Amazon landscape (a link to our geography studies during this term) although the places that he painted do not actually exist. Each of his compositions – many of which look like tropical jungles – are actually imaginary places conjured up from the studies he did of plants and animals observed in zoos and gardens in and around Paris.
We have been using a range of media, including watercolour, ink pens and pencil crayons to create our own studies and details of foliage.
We then developed our learning further by exploring Rousseau’s use of colour, line, pattern and texture in details of his inspirational work.
On Wednesday, we enjoyed a wonderful day of celebration for the Queen’s Jubilee.
The day started with an assembly giving thanks for our Queen and designing and making clay plaques to commemorate the occasion.
During the afternoon we enjoyed traditional games in our playground including What’s the time Mr Wolf, Fire on the Mountain and Hopscotch. It was lovely to see the children from all across our school playing together happily.
Next we moved into our brightly decorated hall to watch snippets of the Coronation, eat delicious refreshments and sing the National Anthem at our indoor street-party.
After all the restrictions of Covid over the last two years, this was an amazing way to end this half term!
Inspired by the items found in the tombs of the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, including Tutankhamen himself, Class 4 have been exploring line, tone, colour and shape in their sketch books.
We used a range of media including oil pastels, watercolours, chalk pastels, drawing pencils and ink pens.
EYFS are coming to the end of their super space topic for this half term. We started with the famous story “Whatever Next!” and enjoyed role-playing a journey to space and having a picnic on the moon. Learning about some of the planets was top of Reception’s ‘What I want to learn’ list and after finding out some interesting facts, they then designed their own using a ‘wash’ effect with felt tips and paintbrushes dipped in water. We thought carefully about the colour of our planets and what they were made from – gas, rock or ice. Constellations were also a big hit; we found out that some constellations can only be seen in certain parts of the world and then recreated some famous ones on black card using chalk. We spent two weeks in total creating our own model of the solar system using papier mache and adding details to each planet; lots of sticky fun! We learnt about gravity and watched videos of astronauts on board the International Space Station, finding out that the further away from earth you get, the less gravity there is. We have enjoyed lots of child-led opportunities in provision including puffy moon painting, making craters in moon dough, designing aliens on the light panel and baking cake pops. We definitely have some budding astronauts in the making!
We have enjoyed the opportunities that we have all had to work with local artist Sophie Martin on our mural over the last few months. At the very beginning stages every child, including our nursery, had the opportunity to create a drawing of something in our school grounds, the playing fields and around our village that would contribute to the final painting. Sophie then integrated our work with her own to create the final piece that has provided such a striking, colourful and eye-catching creation that can be enjoyed everyday in our dining room. Some of older children can be seen here working on the final painting!
Thank you to the Michelle Jurd Memorial Trust, who generously funding our project, we have all been able to enjoy creating a collaborative piece on the theme of ‘Our Community’ with Sophie.
We spent a happy and productive session just before Christmas creating our final clay tiles, inspired by our research into Roman mosaic patterns. Here we are rolling out the tiles and creating our designs based on our sketch book plans. Some indented the clay by pressing different tools into it and others added clay to build up raised parts of the design, remembering to score and use water to make sure they stayed attached once dry!
Here are our finished designs with a few beside the final plans in our sketch books!
Years 5+6 have been learning all about the work of Paul Cezanne.
Cezanne was a French painter who is often regarded as the father of modern art influencing many other artists including Picasso. Many of his most recognisable paintings are still-life studies of a group of everyday objects arranged on a table or cloth: they often contained fruit, plates, water jugs, vases and even human skulls!
Cézanne created more than 900 oil paintings and 400 watercolours during his lifetime.
In Class 4, we have been learning how to represent 3D objects onto a piece of paper by completing studies of apples in our sketch books using only three tones – dark, medium, light – with pencil crayons.
After studying and discussing a range of different still-life compositions created by Cezanne, we created our own arrangements and began our own observational studies in pencil.
Finally, we worked on using colour to to show light and dark in our compositions. Here are our paintings so far; our finished pieces will be on display in school very soon!
