Art


Platinum Jubilee

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!


Sketch Books in Years 5+6

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.


Super Space in EYFS!

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!


Our School Mural

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.


Clay Tiles

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!

 


Still-life and the work of Paul Cezanne

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!


Icy art in Class One

Nursery and Reception have been observing the signs that winter is on its way! After noticing the frost last week, we decided to make some of our own ice decorations using natural materials. We collected leaves, conkers and twigs to create them and then hung them on our apple tree to watch what happened as they began to melt. The results were beautiful!


The Making of the Mural

Work has begun on our fabulous mural in the dining room!! Make sure you keep an eye on how it develops over the next few days and weeks!

Thank you once again to the Michelle Jurd Memorial Trust and to our artist, Sophie Martin!


Arts Week – pen drawings and watercolour

Class 4 have really enjoyed the opportunity to work with local artist Sophie Martin recently.

After a demonstration from Sophie and the opportunity to see her work, we went out into our community to complete a range of observational drawings of different aspects of Levens Village.

We have been developing our ink drawings back in school with the use of watercolour.


Sculpture and the Human Form

Scafell have been working on observing and drawing the human form, one of the most challenging subjects to represent on paper.

We began by completing quick 15minute sketches of each other – keeping still in a carefully constructed pose was almost as difficult as the drawing!

We then moved on to exploring the human figure in 3D using play dough and aluminium foil. We could manipulate our figures into lots of different poses.  We used these to create very quick gesture poses.   We are now working on our wire  sculptures and hope to be able to share these very soon!