Jackson Pollock Guitars

Next on our list was this fun activity. As always, Pinterest was my saviour and I remembered finding a rockin' Pollock guitar challenge to fit in with our "Playlist" topic by Art with Mrs Seitz.

We learnt about the artist himself and looked at some of his work. Some of the children were confused and felt that they could produce similar if not better art but others were able to appreciate it!

To give the effect of a Pollock painting, we dipped string into paint using clothes pegs (to save us from extra messiness) and the children then laid the string across the guitar outlines that they had drawn and cut out from coloured paper beforehand. They could move around different tables to get different tables and overlap the colours. I was surprised by how effective this technique was and the class really enjoyed it.

We glued the colourful guitars to black paper and then painted our background. I urged them to try to think of how they could convey movement and sound, some painted musical notes and others went for more abstract designs.

The final stage, once the guitars were dry, was to glue on extra details such as string and tin foil (for frets and other guitar details).

It was great having such an unstructured art lesson and I really felt that the children had a lot of creative freedom and room to express themselves. Here's how they turned out and thanks Mrs Seitz!

DB.

Paul Klee Inspirational Lyrics

We shared this project in our sharing assembly this week and I received lots of positive comments from staff afterwards. As our topic is Playlist, we looked into the work of Paul Klee who was heavily inspired by music for many of his pieces of work. His mother was a singer and his father was a music teacher. I came across a similar project here at Mrs Picasso's art room, but wanted to make an extra link to our topic by using song lyrics.

We looked at this piece in particular and discussed how Klee used colour and lettering to create art:

We had previously set the children a homework task of thinking of a short phrase or few words from a song that particularly meant something to them. They came up with some wonderful ideas with inspirational messages.

Equipment

White paper

Felt tips or coloured pencils

Black marker

Ruler

1. To save time, I drew out a grid and photocopied it for all children.

2. They took their lyrics and wrote them out into the grid using a pencil, one letter in each box. I stressed for them to use up as much of each box as possible for the letter to make it stand out. 

3. To colour, the children coloured the boxes without a letter in just with one colour and the boxes that did have a letter in would colour each section in differently.

4. The last step was to use a ruler and black marker to go over the grid lines and then the lettering to really make it clear.

Here are our inspirational results:

I would love to post them all but I don't want to overload you! They look brilliant and I'm so impressed that every single child managed to come out with beautiful lyrics. Well done everyone, especially those in the assembly and thanks to the parents who were able to come along to support!

DB.

Class Mountain Range

To finish off our latest topic, Misty Mountains, we set the children the ambitious task of creating their own 3D papier-mache mountains. They put themselves into groups of 3 and were fantastic at bringing in the materials that we asked for. The projects probably took about 3-4 full afternoons altogether but we are all so incredibly proud of the results. It's a shame we didn't have them finished in time for the parents' book look, but they'll make quite an impression when they get taken home later this week!

Equipment
Cardboard for the base of the mountain
Newspaper
Tin foil
Masking tape
Water, flour and salt mixed for the papier-mache paste
Paint
Extra decorations

1. The groups cut out their large square/rectangular base for the mountain

2. Using scrunched up pieces of newspaper, they made rough mountainous shapes by taping these pieces down to the base and layering them on top of each other. They could make any kind of interesting shape they wanted to provide a support for the next layers.

3. Once they were happy with their rough newspaper shape, tin foil was cut up and stuck over the top of the whole mountain shape. The foil could be given a shape that held itself together much better.

4. After being full covered in foil, the mountain was then completely covered in masking tape strips to hold it all together and to make a better surface for the papier mache solution.

5. We tore up a huge amount of newspaper strips and learnt about tearing along the grain of the paper to get neat tears. Water, flour and salt was then mixed to make a paste. The newspaper strips were then layered on top of the structure. This was left to dry overnight and harden.

6. We did a rough base coat layer. Some groups chose grey, brown and some went for a gradation of greys.

7. Once dry, each group was given blue, green, white and black paint. With these they could add extra details to their terrain and mix a range of different blues/greens by adding black/white which they understood because of their recent work on value.

8. Any final decorations were added. Some groups sprinkled over glitter to act as snow, others crumbled up polystyrene foam to act as the snowy part. Some groups added pebbles to act as boulders and rock formations, some added blue ribbon and beads for their water. A clever trick that some groups opted for was picking evergreen leaves. They then pricked a small hole in the surface using a pencil and glued to leaf into the hole to make it look like a tree. Very effective!

I'm so pleased with these results and wish there was a good way of storing them all in the class so we could continue to admire them. We are more than likely going to share these in part of our assembly which I'm sure the rest of the school will enjoy. Massive congratulations, 4B! Here are the results:

Brilliant project everyone and I can't wait to share these with the rest of the school in our assembly on Friday.

DB.

Japanese Garden

Onto our next challenge! One of the mountains used as a table name in class is Mount Fuji and it's accompanied by a lovely image of Japanese fields with the mountain in the background. Japan had sparked some interest so I thought building on that would be an interesting experience for the class.

I had previously come across this wonderful painting below which is one of the pieces taught at The Paint Bar:

This seemed like a wonderful idea but I had no idea how to go about it with a class of 30 children. I played around at home over the weekend and eventually came up with using chalk as this would eliminate the problem of waiting for paint to dry. Although the chalk came out well, it really did get everywhere and the chalk supply at school is rather limited. The compromise was to use chalk for the mountain effect and oil pastels for all of the other details. I showed the class pictures of Japan and focused on the symbolism of blossom, bridges and pagodas. It captured their imagination instantly and they were very eager to try out their own Japanese garden.

Equipment Needed
- Red paper
- White card
- White chalk
- Oil pastels

Instructions
1. We watched parts of this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMiyNwQJ13w) which talks through the chalk method for the mountains. You take your white card and draw the mountain shapes from one side to the other. You then tear along the line as close as possible. You end up with two pieces of card (dispose of the bottom half and keep the top)

2. Paperclip the top half of the card onto your red paper. Draw another line along your mountain line and colour this section in with a thick layer of chalk.

3. Use your finger to smudge the chalk down onto the red paper. Make sure you work your way across the line but keep smudging it DOWN. Once you've gone all the way along just take off the white card and you're left with your chalky mountains.

4. To produce your water/grass parts, first draw a blew wavy line and blend together different shades of blue and purple.

5. Then add your layer of green on top. Use white to frame the edges of the landscape and create hills if you want.

6. Add blossom trees with small strokes. Start with the deeper purple and work your way up to light pink/white.

7. Draw your pagoda with black pencil to ensure your shape is clean. It can be quite fiddly drawing with pastels!

8. Colour in your pagoda.

9. Add a bridge and any extra final finishing touches. You are the left with a beautiful Japanese garden being overlooked by mountains.

Of course, this is a very simplified version of the original painting I came across and I would love to attempt that at some point, but I certainly feel that this was the best approach for such large classes of 9-year olds! Check out some of our results below:

Although this was quite prescriptive (and that's not how I usually like to do it!) I was very happy to see some children adding their own touches like different shapes for their pagodas, variations on the trees and bits of wildlife.

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In other arty news, I went to a Pop-up Painting event the other night in Richmond with a friend. Neither of us are exactly artistic prodigies but we had a brilliant time. The people were really friendly and the evening was lovely. There were about 20 adults sitting in a room above a pub with a class led by a professional artist. The piece of art we were using as our stimulus was Girl with a Balloon by Banksy. Mine wasn't coming out how I liked and started to look like a stormy sky, yellow cliffs, red-ish sand and a blue ocean. Therefore, I changed my tactic and put the girl with her lost balloon standing on a balcony overlooking the scene. I highly recommend the night for an evening that's a bit different.

DB.

Banyan Trees

I know that these have been done a billion times by all your art teacher bloggers, but I've always loved the pictures that pop up on Pinterest and think, "I've got to do that some day!" Today was the day I could finally squeeze this into one of our topics (albeit tenuously). As you know, we are studying mountains this half-term and I am doing all I can to find mountainous artwork projects. I found that the Banyan tree is the national tree of India (where part of the Himalayas stretch into), LINK FOUND! I know it's not the most solid of connections but we can't just draw mountains every week. Also, the results are so beautiful that they're worth slightly bending the rules for.

The Banyan tree project has been taken out of a book called "Dynamic Art Projects for Children" which is currently sitting in my cupboard. One of the amazing art blogs that has features this project is 'Artisan des Arts' run by Aly Marcotte. A link to her results can be found here. Thankfully, she also included a very clear step-by-step process for drawing the tree itself found here. I've copied and pasted the tutorial into this post below too so you can follow along.

I showed the children lots of pictures of banyan trees and discussed their significance to India. They're particularly interesting because roots actually grow down from their branches into the ground.

Equipment

- Black paper

- Oil pastels (I'm sure this would work with chalk, too!)

- Pencil

Step-By-Step

1. Every child started with a sheet of black A4 paper in a landscape position. I displayed Aly's tutorial pictures on the board and modelled using my own sheet of paper at the front. Some children drew in white pencil which has come out quite nicely in the end, some used pencil which could then be rubbed out right at the end of the project. Here is Aly's excellent drawing tutorial:

Step 2

I showed the class the colour wheel and explained that analogous colours are colours that are next to each other on the wheel. They were then instructed to fill in the spaces between the branches with 2 or 3 analogous colours blended into each other. They had the freedom to choose any particular colour scheme they wanted or they could just go the random approach.

Step 3

In the space between the branches and the water, children had more freedom for different patterns and designs. Some wanted to go for a misty blue stripe atmosphere, many were keen to do different sunset pictures. 

Step 4

In the water section, I demonstrated how a range of different blues, purples, greens and white could be used to create a watery effect. I then showed how reflections could be made by drawing black zig-zag lines.

I've definitely said this before, but this is a big contender for my favourite art project of the year. As our art co-ordinator, I do everything I can to source interesting projects that the children can be successful with. This ended up being a highly successful activity for all children. Some of the year group got a bit confused in stages (colouring in the tree with colour instead of the background, colouring the tree white etc) but they still turned out beautifully in their own way.

DB.