Foundation – Yealm Class
Collage jewellery
Bling from Tiffanys and Pandora is so yesterday.
Yealm’s miniature jewellers used simple collage to make beautiful animal bracelets from card and paper.
Armed with pencils and pens they then coloured in and added their own drawings to a 5 metre wide zoological masterpiece I’d prepared earlier.
KS1 Curriculum: Simple Printmaking – Warren Class (Yrs 1&2)
From blob to brilliant
National treasure and illustrative juggernaut Quentin Blake creates his characters with just a few strokes of his pen. Through my patented ‘blob technique’ (first making coloured shapes across our paper then adding hair and facial features) Warren Class explored how to harness Blake’s style to draw all kinds of faces and emotions.
We then applied our new-found skills to create a big banner drawing. It rivals the Bayeux Tapestry in detail and content and can possibly be seen in the school’s Middle Room if it hasn’t been used to line the bottom of the guinea pig cage already..?
Headdresses that reflect the school’s natural environment AND visions and values.
Fashioned from second hand stationery and elevated with ping pong eyeballs, these hats will no doubt be adorning the heads of the Great and Good at all social events this season.
The range includes: Fish, Seagull, Crab, Collaboration, Confidence, Creativity and God.
The young milliners were excited to wear their creations home so I only have a photo of our marine themed hat: ‘Fish’.
KS2 Curriculum – Working with shape and colour:
Cellars Class (Yrs 3&4)
Start with a squiggle:
Confronted with a blank sheet of paper, any artist can feel confounded. We asked our classmates to prompt us with a random squiggle/line/shape on our paper. Then we used a different colour to turn this mark into a masterpiece. The starter squiggles are highlighted in yellow on the examples below.
Painting birds with feathers and quills:
The humble brush has had it’s day. We came over all medieval and used both ends of a feather dragged through my Gouache palette (opaque water-based paints) to make these bird prints.
Painting with extended brushes
Why hunch over a desk when you can sit back and paint from a distance? Using Mr B-W’s extensive stick collection foraged from local woodlands, we extended our brushes to comic lengths. The result was almost universally ‘abstract’ and we certainly gave the likes of famous artists Jackson Pollock and Wilem de Kooning a run for their money.
Revelstoke Class (Yrs 5&6)
Evolution drawings
Inspired by the brilliant Quentin Blake, we explored how stature, posture, clothing, hair and expression are key to denote different ages. We drew ourselves as helpless newborns, grumpy teenagers, 30-something go-getters and even mummified remains…
Upper KS2 curriculum: Mixed media
Humanimal Mash-ups
Students were asked to combine animal heads and human bodies torn from magazines. Perfect pairings had to be carefully chosen. There were so many brilliant examples. Some are shown below.
World Book Day Loo Roll Challenge
Brief: To create your fictional hero using found* materials.
Cellars and Revelstoke attacked this brief with vigour and enthusiasm and the results were brilliant to behold. Following in the footsteps of celebrated sculptors like Samson Kambalu and Alison Lapper, Oliver’s BFG is worthy of being mounted on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square.
*Found materials are items destined for the bin
Photo credit Ron Ellis: Shutterstock
LEGACY MURAL
Creative collaboration between artist, students from years 3-6 and celebrity interiors experts Lawrence LLewelyn-Bowen and his twin brother also called Lawrence (but sometimes masquerading as Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters fame).
Objective: To apply a painting of the area directly (and nerve-wrackingly) onto the Assembly Hall wall with bold outlines and vibrant colour using standard emulsion and high opacity acrylic paint pens from Japan.
A 30 second accelerated video ‘The Making of the Mural’ will be available very soon.
