Family Art and Friends
Summer 2024
Wire Sculptures.
Threading foamy bits onto wire, twisting, bending, creating snakey sculptures. Adding different textures, materials and paint.
Family Frames!
We have been making frames again! Using a cardboard base we added 'stacked' cardboard shapes, including hearts, triangles, squares, rectangles, circles and stars. We used PVA glue to stack our shapes and also glued on some wooden shapes, so the surface of our frames is almost three dimensional and interesting to touch. Once everything was dry we used acrylic paint to decorate our frames with vibrant colours.
Nest Building
Building on our nest drawings/collages, we used a range of materials to realise our nests in three dimensions. We started by creating a 'pinch pot' out of clay , then added twigs, shredded paper and feathers to create more interest through different tones and textures. We kept adding bits of clay; packing small pieces into little gaps to make our nests stronger and more robust. We paid attention to smoothing the inside of the nests with our fingers, making it comfortable for the eggs and baby birds.
March 2024
It's Nesting Time!
It's the last day of Spring term, so making some nest artworks seems like a fitting seasonal end to the term. The nests have been made using fur,twigs, hessian, paper, string, and we have used twigs as paintbrushes to add scratchy ink marks and charcoal to draw smudgy eggs . We added speckles to our eggs in the form of dots and dashes. It was especially exciting to squeeze the glue onto the paper directly from the tube. Sometimes we extend Family Art to other family members in the school; today we had sibling sisters Ava and Willow, both doing a terrific job.
March 2024
Witches Kitchens
In Drawing Club the children have been very excited about all the awful things that witches keep in their kitchens, so we continued with this theme in Family Art. What's in the Witch's Kitchen by Nick Sharratt is a super pop up book - the children love all the surprises folded away in the stories' pages. We made doors from cardboard, painted them with shiny acrylic paints, then made concertina books that contained really horrible stuff for the witches to eat, or make spells out of.
Spring Daffodils.....made from paper, paint and lots of lovely shades of yellow.
February 2024
Spots and Dots
Y2 have been talking about the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama; famous for filling whole environments, including paintings, sculptures and outfits, in spots and dots. We made some spotty spring flowers, using collage and paint.
Merry Christmas from Family Art.... we're Iooking forward to more art adventures in 2024
December 2023
Its Gruffalo time again! Throughout this term, children in FS2 have been building on their mark making skills using line, crosshatching, flicks and smudging. You can see these techniques used to great effect in these charcoal Gruffalo drawings, made in collaboration with their parents.
November 2023
Cinderella
The children have been reading Cinderella in the classroom, talking about Ugly Sisters and imagining alternative types of transport to take Cinderalla home from the ball. In Family Art we built on these ideas by making little stage sets that open up like a book, displaying different characters, costumes, and props from the traditional tale.
October 2023
Kitemaking
Today our families made fantastic kites using willow twigs, wool , tape and bin-liners. We used lightweight materials to enable the kite to fly, and decorated the tails with colourful paper rectangles. Now all we need is a big gust of wind!
Autumn Term 2023 - A big welcome to all our new Family Artists from FS2!
Observing 'Painted Lady' butterflies that have recently emerged from their cocoons and recreating scenes from The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. A lovely way to end the school year ......
June 2023
The School Garden
What a lovely time of year to take our sketchbooks outside. Lots is happening in our school garden, the poly-tunnel is super hot, but outside, where it is cooler we can look at plants closely and make observational drawings. We dissected the onion head, which Noah said smelt "100% onion" ! Today, I saw many parents take some time for themselves to enjoy drawing and painting in the sunshine, whilst the children played and watered the plants. When the grown ups make great work too , the children are so proud!
May 2023
Siblings!
Today, in Family Art, we invited siblings, ranging from Year 1 to Year 6, to join in the session. Some siblings like to work together - some siblings don't! Today we revisited skills from a previous session, so that our foundation children could be the 'experts', and demonstrate to their older brothers and sisters the various making skills and attachment techniques required to make these paper flower gardens, inspired by the spotty sculpture of Japanese artist, Kusama. .
April 2023
Yucky Worms
Foundation children are reading Yucky Worms, by Vivien French, and learning about the important jobs worms do in the soil. Worms eat organic waste, like dead leaves, and recycle the nutrients through their amazing poo, which keeps soil healthy and good for growing things. We focussed on printing in the first session, creating worm segments using chopped up sponges, and worm casts (the poo) by coiling up a pipe-cleaner. We continue to build on our skills for attaching materials, as you can see from these wonderful models , threading foamy bits onto bendy wire, and using packaging shreds to represent the organic waste in the soil.
February 2022
Our Family Art community is expanding, with each child now choosing a friend to bring to the session, and work alongside themselves and their grown up. This week we have been drawing and designing suspension bridges, inspired by the book Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty. After talking about how suspension bridges are constructed, the children made pencil drawings first then created collages using mixed media - next, we will build a bridge in 3 dimensions!
