So again this week we were painting without brushes, this time with sponge brushes – actually pieces of foam stuck on a stick. We looked at the work of Howard Hodgkin for inspiration, as his broad brush strokes with multiple colours on them are exactly the effects that sponge brushes can do so easily. It’s particularly exciting when the colours mix on the sponge, and when you twist and twirl the brush. This is another technique in which giving yourself less control –…
Did you know that although palette knives were used for centuries to mix paint it’s thought that it wasn’t until Rembrandt that artists actually thought to use them to apply the paint to the canvas? I suppose until then painters required the greater control that a paintbrush could give them, and the rough, scratchy marks a palette knife could give were not so interesting. More fool them I say because palette knives are amazing painting tools, as we demonstrated this week! Palette knives…
This term we are going back to basics and focusing on different painting or drawing tools. And this week it’s back to basics with our subject matter – classical sculptures. We have a few plaster casts in the studio, and I printed out some pictures of Greek and Roman statues to choose from. Taking inspiration from this Access Art session, I introduced the use of pen and ink – in which we find the shadows using a soft brush and coloured ink, using…
For the last week of term I decided to showcase all that the kids had learned about fonts, text and design and give them the freedom to promote any cause they wanted. They could make a placard (complete with cardboard stick!) or a poster, using paint, marker pens and/or collage. We had some brilliant designs, slogans,and causes, both earnest and joking.
This week we looked into writing/drawing comics/graphic novels. We discussed how they manage to combine words and text together to create something that is more than the sum of it’s parts. I showed them how really the action in a comic happens between the boxes – the gutter – and in the imagination of the reader as the comics can only portray still images. But these still images can also use various tricks to convey movement – from movement lines, blurred images, blurred…
This week I asked the kids to make book covers. What book was up to them, and what age. I showed them some examples, and we talked about what makes a good cover, how you need to match the font to the style and content of the book, how book covers indicate for what age they are meant etc. And then of course, some weren’t satisfied with just a cover and made a whole book! Some of our older children wanted instead to…
This week I showed the kids message art – that is art that uses text to convey a message, usually a political one, often using photomontage. The artists we looked at included Barbara Kruger, Russian constructivists such as Alexandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, and Hannah Hoch. The children of course didn’t have to go political, and some were more comical, such as Leonardo’s ‘Never give up’ which was left unfinished, as if the he had given up – I assure you this was…
This week I took inspiration from a painting by my grandmother, who was also an artist. She often worked with text, and in this painting she painted her letters in transparent layers so that the colours change when they overlap. The kids used coloured acetate to create a similar effect and, understandably for some, the technique suggested pictures or patterns rather than text.
Continuing our theme of text, this time we used text (in the form of newspapers) for its different tonal values. Different sized text torn up will create different tonal shades – dark to light – and with that you have you palette and can create anything.Some also couldn’t resist adding a bit of colour from the newspapers! I assembled a group of fairly simple fruit, veg and white porcelain cups. As a warm up activity, we did ink and charcoal drawings of the…