Class Art- Overlapping Potion Bottles

This week's art lesson was a cracker! I've had a beautiful piece of work pinned for a while that I found here but never had a way of incorporating it into school. With our new topic, Potions, I finally have a unit of work where it can fit in perfectly.

We've been looking at lot at potion bottles and glass designs which gave us a good head-start. We observed pictures of overlapping wine bottles and glasses and the children were hooked with the colours straight away. So, these are the steps that we followed to try and reach the target of the one below that I made. This was slightly simpler but still gave them a challenge!

Equipment
A4 black paper
A5 white paper
Oil pastels
Scissors

1. Each table started off with a black A4 piece of paper and lots of A5 sheets of white scrap paper. First, children had to fold this A5 paper in half and draw the shape of half a bottle. They then cut this out and it opens up into a perfectly symmetrical bottle shape. This then became a stencil for them to use.

2. Children created and cut out their bottle designs to fill the page and once happy, they could start using a different colour for each design. We used oil pastels for this activity. I stressed that each glass had to be overlapping with at least one other and I also wanted to see some glasses in the foreground and some in the background. This could be achieved by some having their base lower down the page and those at the back having their base higher up the page.

3. Once all the outlines were done, we imagined a small arrow in the top corner of our page which acted as light. Children then took a white pastel and went along the outlines of the bottles that would be directly in the light. On the opposite side, they thickened the line with the same colour that they had used and then smudged in towards the centre of the bottle. This made it look more 3D and realistic.

It wasn't too tricky a project and only took just over an hour to complete, Some children tapped into their creativity and attempted different shading styles and some tried to create shadows. Other teachers passed the room after-school and complimented how well they had all turned out.

Here they are!

Everyone did such a great job but unfortunately I can't post 30 individual pictures! Well done and keep trying more at home.

DB.