Category : Art & Design

We love to enhance our curriculum, so in Year 1 this term there is a Creative Club with Mrs Yardley where we get to use our Art and Design skills even more.

This week we looked at some of Wassily Kandinsky’ s work and we found out that he was a Russian painter and was born in 1866. After looking at some of his paintings we were shocked that he painted them so long ago as we thought that they looked quite modern.

We looked in particular at ‘Squares with Concentric Circles’ and used it to inspire our own collage based on this painting.

This term in Y1 we are looking at some of the work of Roy Lichtenstein and are studying still life drawing and some aspects of Pop Art.

First we used different pencils and made a variety of thick, thin, curved, straight, dark and light lines, we drew shapes and practised shading and creating ‘Ben Day’ dots inside them. We practised looking closely at shells to draw observationally focussing on the shape, lines and shading.

Once we were happy with our pieces we used the class still life composition to draw our own version of ‘Still Life with Brushes, Shells and Starfish’. Once we had finished the observational drawing we used a black pen to  draw round the outlines and then we painted it in Brusho.

In Year 2, we have been creating images of the sky in the style of John Ward. We used chalk pastels to blend different colours!

Y2 used chalk pastels to create calm sea backgrounds inspired by John Ward in Art this afternoon.

Henri Rousseau, 1844-1910

What do you think?

This term, Year Four have been exploring the works of the post-impressionist artist, Henri Rousseau. In particular, his works that were inspired by his time spent at the Botanical Gardens in Paris from which he imagined rainforest and jungle-themed  pieces. Some critics didn’t like his work as they said that it was unrealistic and childish. Rousseau painted in a ‘modern naive’ style and his work was admired by other well respected artists such as Pablo Picasso. Year Four found out about Henri’s life and self taught style of painting and were encouraged to share their opinions of his works, this is what we  thought….  

The Merry Jesters, 1906, On display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA.

Evie W thought that “the animals that Rousseau painted look quite like a cartoon.” She commented that she liked the shades that he used to create the vegetation. 

The Snake Charmer, 1907, on display at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Ella C explained ” I like the colours used in the sky and the plants that are at the front of the painting. The shapes of the leaves are good as he has used lots of different types of leaves.”

The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, 1905

“It looks okay but the I think the lion looks slightly green!” commented Jay.

Ethan S said  “It is a cool painting and its got lots of shades of green. I like that it is very ‘rainforesty’.”

Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) (1891) was the first of many jungle scenes for which Rousseau is best known.

Jessica B “I love the stripes on the tiger, it makes me think of my bedroom as I’ve got animal wall paper all around it! I love the leaves as they reminded me of my trip to Knowsley Safari Park”.

This week, Y4 have been looking at Roman mosaics in their art lessons.

They started by looking at some traditional, large scale mosaics and how the small tesserae tiles come together to make a detailed image, very much like pixels on a modern screen!

We also looked at mosaics today, including a very famous local mosaic ‘Three Ships’ in the city centre. Most didn’t even realise this was a mosaic!

Our mosaics would reflect the examples of nature often found in Roman mosaics, we also wanted to keep a local link so we decided to create mosaics of fish, taking inspiration from some excellent examples.

Our finished mosaics turned out fantastic! Well done for concentrating so hard on this tricky and time consuming work!