Some New Bird Collagraphs

Here are a selection of recent year 7s bird collagraphs.  I've included some examples of hand colouring that they did on top of extra prints, which I think are just lovely.  I did this project once before but this time I think the results are much better (see photos here).  I got the students to trace around individual shapes on their drawings and then they pieced the different textures together bit by bit.

The students used drawings of their own to develop into their collagraph.  They used a variety of different textured surfaces to create their collagraph plate including anaglypta wallpaper (brilliant for collagraphs), sandpaper, lentils, pasta, leaves, string, plastic mesh, cling film, tinfoil...anything that we could find that had a texture!  I got the students to bring in textured 'stuff' from home and they brought in all sorts of wierd and wonderful things to use.  Once they had finished their collagraph plates they covered these with shellac and left to dry over night.

I had sourced some old samples of anaglypta wallpaper from local wallpaper shops, who sold me sample books of the stuff for $40 per book.  Apparently anaglypta wallpaper is expensive in Australia, which was a bit of a shock to me as it is really quite cheap back in the UK.  Infact, when I did this project before I got free samples from B Q!  It took me a while to find where I could get the wallpaper and most people didn't have a clue what I was talking about!

Students hard at work decorating their clay sculptures...

I thought that I would include some photos of the students hard at work on their clay tribal masks to help show the process that they went through to make them.  In these photos the students have received their clay sculptures out of the kiln and the clay has been bisque fired.  They are at the painting and decorating stage and are using a wide variety of materials.  I encouraged the students to think about what unusual things they could add for hair, jewellery, etc and in my example I used a spray painted mop head for the hair, which rather looks like dredlocks!

grrreat

I often feel that the best part of a project is when you are in the thick of it, and not necessarily finishing something off.  I think that these photos show lots of creativity and happy students, which is always really good to see when you are a teacher!

The finished masks are featured here.

Tribal Inspired Sculptures (Clay & Mixed Media)

I recently just finished a big clay project with some year 9 and 10 students.  It was a project that I did at my previous school (which I posted an earlier blog post about here).  The students had been studying portraiture during the semester and for their final art work they had to model their face in clay and decorate it using tribal influences. 

The clay was moulded around newspaper bases and they are mostly hollow.  They were bisque fired then painted with acrylic and water colour paints.  Student were encouraged to find 'extras' to add to their clay pieces and some students really went full out!  I love that some of the studnets thought to use wigs and fake eyelashes for extra life-likeness!  To finish, the heads were mounted onto wooden backings, ready for hanging!

Hope you like them...