watercolour wonder

'Golden and red trees, nod to the soft breeze, as it whispers, 'winter is near'...A Fall Song (Ellen Robina Field)

water...watercolour paint needs lots of water...inspiring the children to grab what they might find around the home, coffee filters and newspaper. With a few tubes of primary colour and a little basic colour theory, they are on their way to blending colours!
Our inspiration last thursday involved leaf litter and glorious autumnal colour! Children learned about composition, background and foreground as they built up their collages with watercolour leaves, fabric and felt leaves and the odd ant + leaf-litter creature! Environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy again and watercolour artist, Joseph Turner were our Great Artist inspiration:

'Spades take up leaves, no better than spoons, and bags full of leaves are as light as balloons'.... Gathering Leaves (Robert Frost)

fantastic fungi forest!

Oh My!! (I have been saying that a lot lately!) I was thrilled with the open-ended clay workshops held last week - the creations produced were so imaginative! I had a particular design in mind centred around clay mushrooms and moss and as each child used their own imagination, some gathered nature and applied techniques for working with clay, the resultant work was unique and beautiful!

We enjoyed inspiration from Andy Goldsworthy and french sculptor Franco Pompon, as well as brousing nature sculptures by various artists. We concluded our inspiration with a study of the many and varied shapes, textures and forms of fungi!! Exerpts from The Enchanted Wood (Enid Blyton) and Snugglepot + Cuddlepie (May Gibbs) whet the imagination and they were off...!

We concluded our time by 'exhibiting' our work to one another, telling the story of our creations - I was so inspired by the origionality and diversity of their work - planting the seed that each child is an artist when they produce something that is an expression of themselves!

Leaves! lesson preparation

...INSPIRE the imagination through the work of Great Artists....
..GROW knowledge through the use of age-appropriate art theory...

Just thought I would share some of the preparation that goes into the classes we design for your children! I am working on the 'Leaves' workshop at the moment and thoroughly enjoying putting together the vocabularly and inspiration that undergirds each lesson.
Some of the concepts the children will learn and we will practice and discuss are below:
Texture: the actual way a piece of artwork feels or looks like it should feel when touched.
Composition: the arrangement of the parts of a picture
Contrast: the use of opposites together, dark and light colours, rough and smooth textures.
Pattern: a repeated design or sequence
Blending: using two colours to make another ie. red + yellow = orange. Introducing the colour wheel.
Our inspiration is by ANDY GOLDSWORTHY a favourate artist who works primarily outdoors with nature. (born 1956) a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist living in Scotland, who creates site-specific sculptures in both rural and urban settings. His art involves the use of natural and found objects to create both temporary and permanent sculptures that draw out the character of their environment.

:: Work by Andy Goldsworthy