Year 6 Taster Days Polyboard Mosque Prints

Year 9 Cubist Work

The year 9 students completed their final cubist art works this week – with fantastic results.  Students studied Cubism in depth over a 2 month period, looking at the work of an artist, making research drawings and experimented with different materials.  It’s great to see such diversity in the final work – well done year 9s!
Shady's hot & cold musical instruments...

Chanel's piece has lots of different materials collaged-including some metal rings from her dad's work...

Clara's sculpture was a very ambitious piece, and absolutely fantastic in my opinion!...

This is Sondos's who is in Mrs Walsh's class...

Zahrah's shoes....

Harrison's cool sculpture...

Iman's piece...can you see the hidden faces?  She made hers using oil paints - and it still smells lovely!

Duncan's...

Faris's piece.  He really got into the Cubist spirit with this project and spent a lot of time at home coming up with all sorts of ideas - including sculpture and installation ideas.... 

Aseel's beautiful piece, which she spent hours on.... 

here is a detail from Aseel's.  She collaged magazine pages onto the surface, along with other materials.  She has such a lot of patience! 

 Kailey's final work...I love the monocrhome with a splash of bling...

Abrar's piece is busy and colourful... 



Year 10 Exam Work

On Sunday my year 10 students had a full day exam.  Their task was to produce a piece of work based on the theme 'Broken'.  They had 2 weeks to come up with some ideas and trial materials.  Here are their finished work...

Lucy's lino

Rebecca's paper collage, inspired by Matisse

Jessica's painting 

Owen's Hundertwasser inspired piece 

Gemma's 2 masks 

Numan's melting face, inspired by Dali's melting clocks

Joe's Picasso inspired face 

Sophie's coffee stained collage & painting (it smells really strongly of coffee) 

Clare's painting

Hollie's painting 

Adam's dinosaur head -the dots are inspired from Roy Lichtenstein's pop art paintings.  After firing Adam is going to paint this bright purple, a suspicious similarity to Barney the dinosaur I think!

Andrew's painting

Drawing Assessments

Over the last 2 weeks my year 7, 8 and 9 classes have participated in an end of year drawing assessment where they had 2 hours to complete a still life drawing.  Here are some examples of their work.  I think it's lovely to see the different drawing styles, and also I think that the students' characters are often translated into their drawings.  My favourites are always the 'wonky' ones.

(The shading looks particularly dark in these images)

This is one of the still life groups that they were drawing...



Bee Kite

A couple of years ago I did a kite design project with a group of 2nd year students back home in Scotland.  The department I was teaching in had loads of willow sticks and one of the teachers there set me the challenge of finding something to do with them.  After soaking in water, they are quite bendy and you can do all sorts of fun things with willow, but I decided on kites. 

Here are the students' kites up on the wall...

Here are some photos of how I made my kite...

Shape your frame with the willow sticks and hold in place with masking tape...

 Cover with paper mache.

...until it is completely covered, like this...

Then you can paint it....

For the kite string, I bought some from ebay very cheaply, and made cardboard string holders.  I helped students to string the kites up as it was a bit tricky, and you needed to work out the best place to attach the string for balance and best flying positions.
Did they fly?  Well, kind of!  I took the 2nd year class out on a mildly windy day and we had some stay up for about 20 seconds.  I think on a windier day we would have had better flying records.  On the down side, the kites were damaged slightly after flying, because they hit the ground, but they were patched up easily when we were back in the classroom.