Art | Sundridge and Brasted CE Primary School

Art

After learning about the Mexican celebration the day of the dead, we began making our own sculptures to resemble the skull decorations used within this festival. Working in pairs, we used newspaper and cellotape to create the basic structure, which we will cover and paint over the next week.

We created our own installations, based on the theme of ourselves, using a shoe box, and items of sentimental value.

As part of our learning about surrealism, we focused on automatic drawing. This was invented by an artist called Joan Miro, and was where you would move your hand randomly across the page, then look for shapes or objects in what you had drawn. This was supposed to reveal what you were subconsciously thinking about!

We’ve been learning about Impressionism. To start, we did some research about this style of painting and learnt that it would have been completed quickly outside, before the light changed. Therefore, the brush strokes were rapid dashes that could be clearly seen on the page. We practiced the techniques of layering colour and using dashes, then recreated some sections of some of Claude Monet’s most famous works.

In term 3 our termly topic has an art focus. To kick start this, we looked at colour theory, learning all about the colour wheel and the types of colour that appear on it. We then created our own versions in our art books, where we were only allowed to use the primary colours to mix all of the other ones that we needed.

We have been exploring lots of different materials and mediums in our art lessons, and using these to create poppies on the theme of remembrance. It was really interesting to compare and contrast the different effects that we were able to create.

We have been learning about the style of Ancient Egyptian art. We learnt that they made use of ‘twist perspective’ in order to get all of the body parts into the image, so that if something happened to their mummified body their soul would have a place to inhabit. After practicing copying the drawings with pencil, we used chalk pastels to create our final artworks.

This week, we moved on to using paint. We learnt about hieroglyphics, and used this to produce our own cartouche - these were ovals filled with a royal name.