Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists finished off their glue pictures this week! The glue had dried to leave shiny black outlines, which the artists filled in using soft pastels. We practised blending, and discussed warm, cool, complementary and analogous colours as we worked.

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists added soft pastel to their beautiful sea turtles!

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists completed their glue drawings too- theirs had the theme of minibeasts. We got some lovely results!

Cyan & Indigo Class

Our Key Stage 3 and 4 artists finished their dummy books this week! We’ve been busy developing short picture book ideas, inspired by traditional tales. It was really interesting to see the different interpretations!

This week we’ve been drawing with glue! This will be a two week project- next week when the glue is dry, we’ll add soft pastel to our designs.

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists worked on an abstract design with the theme ‘taking a line for a walk’. We practised in our sketchbooks using pencils first, and aimed to include lots of different curves and changes of direction.

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists have been basing their glue designs on sea turtles! We’ll be thinking about some under-the-sea colour combinations next week.

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists were inspired by bugs for their designs!

This week, our focus has been on colour!

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists used oil pastels to create colourful cockerels inspired by Picasso’s ‘Le Coq’!

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists learned about warm and cool colours and analogous colours. We practised blending colours in our sketchbooks, then created a warm and cool picture.

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists got to grips with the art of sgraffito. We produced some lovely results using this technique with oil pastels!

This week we focused on texture!

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists felt some different objects and thought of words to describe their textures. We practised showing different textures such as fluffy, spiky and smooth in our sketch books using soft pastels. We then read the story ‘Hair Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy’ and drew dogs, using some of the techniques we’d practised to show the texture of the fur.

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists practised showing tones and textures with charcoal. We used our skills to create drawings of pandas!

Jade and Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists developed their skills in soft pastel. We warmed up by creating different textures such as fluffy, spiky and smooth. We then drew feathers from life, concentrating on showing the feathery texture. We used these skills to produce beautiful portraits of owls. We think they look fantastic!

This week was all about tone!

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists got rather messy while using charcoal! We experimented with markmaking, smudging, combining charcoal with chalk and using erasers. We then made the studio very dark, put a video of thunderstorms on the big screen and created these stormy pictures. 

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists practised achieving a variety of tone using graphite. We worked on creating a ‘shattered tonal drawing’, incorporating different tones and textures.

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists produced some very atmospheric charcoal portraits inspired by the drawings of Alberto Giacometti. Some of the results were really spooky!

Cyan & Indigo Class

Our Key Stage 3 and 4 artists are working on a children’s book illustration project this term. Last week we looked at a variety of picture books and learned about the process of stortyboarding an idea. We chose stories to illustrate, and this week we set about putting them into a storyboard.

We have had a lovely first week back after the Christmas holidays! This term our focus is on drawing, and this week was all about lines! Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists experimented with mark making using coloured pens and pencils. We tried combining straight, curved, wavy and spiky lines, and finished by creating a ‘100 line painting’ using watercolours. 

Amber, Magenta & Violet class

Our year 3 & 4 artists investigated different lines too- we combined a variety of lines to create abstract shapes, which we then added colour to.

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists investigated ways in which lines can be used to create different optical illusions. We produced some really effective 3D hands!

This week we worked on drawing from our imaginations!

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists became illustrators! We read a poem about a monster called The Hippocrump, and imagined what we thought the Hippocrump would look like. We used clues from the poem and our own ideas to illustrate a scene in oil pastel, pencil and watercolour. 

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists created bear characters! We warmed up by practising different facial expressions in our sketchbooks, and chose which one we’d like to use for our drawing. We created the fur textures using tiny lines and dots, which looked really effective. we then decorated the bears’ jumpers using patterns and colours. The bears looked great on their colourful backgrounds!

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists used the pastel techniques we were working on last week to develop their own mythical creatures. We warmed up by combining body parts from three different animals together to form a hybrid, which gave us some ideas for our own invented beasts. We will be continuing with our creations next week!

Cyan & Indigo Class

Our year 7-11 artists continued with their lino printmaking project. We tried some prints with single colours and some using a combination of colours. We got some lovely results!

This week, our classes worked with soft pastel to create some animal drawings!

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists warmed up by using soft pastels to represent different textures in their sketch books. We looked closely at some feathers and talked about the textures we could see and feel. We then created large scale pastel drawings of owls, using photographic reference as a starting point and thinking about the different mark making techniques we could use. We got some lovely results! 

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists experimented with mark making for texture too, and created colourful cockerels! 

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists created dragons’ eyes! We warmed up by following a step by step drawing in our sketchbooks, then adapted the drawing using visual reference and our own imaginations. The results were really effective! 

This term the focus for our reception to year 6 classes is on drawing! Here’s what we’ve been up to in the first week…

Maroon & Turquoise Class

Our reception, year 1 and year 2 artists investigated cave paintings this week. We practised different techniques using charcoal, which would have been one of the materials available to early artists. We replicated the hand art seen on cave walls by placing our hands onto the paper and smudging charcoal around them. We made the paper have a more cave-like texture by crumpling it up before we worked! We then drew cave art style representations of animals and people, and thought about the stories our pictures were portraying.

Amber, Magenta & Violet Class

Our year 3 and 4 artists worked on a series of exercises to help them to focus on looking closely at objects and drawing them accurately. We looked at our chosen objects for 30 seconds before hiding them and drawing them from memory. We then repeated the task, this time looking at the objects for one minute and concentrating on the shapes, lines and forms we could see before creating a more accurate drawing from memory. We completed some contour drawings of the objects then produced our final drawings, building on the skills we’d practised.

Jade & Emerald Class

Our year 5 and 6 artists worked on developing their observational skills too. We followed similar tasks to those done by the year 3 and 4 groups as a warm up, then spent the second half of the session working on our final drawings. As well as aiming to reproduce the shape accurately, we considered texture, tone and light source in our drawings.