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...

Charcoal Eyes

Oh dear!  The last time I put anything up on my blog was in December last year....7 months ago!  I've been a bit busy with settling into life in Australia and starting a new job you see, so please forgive me if you are a follower.

In February this year I started teaching Art and Textiles at a lovely all girls school. The students are very lovely and I've really enjoyed settling into the school and getting to know my classes over the last few months.  All in all, it has been extremely busy semester. 

These eye drawings were done by some students in my year 9 &10 class this semester.  They used charcoal and white chalk and looked at M.C.Escher's 'Eye of Death' (which they loved).  I think that they look fantastic on display together, as visually, a big wall of eyes is very impressive.

With two weeks off for school holidays, one of my goals is to share some more wonderful student work here, so here goes.................

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

Portrait Drawings

This is a photo of one of my displays in my room.  It's the year 10 drawings.  Tonal pencil drawings and an oil pastel study using hot and cold colours.

Charcoal Portraits

These are some charcoal drawings done by my year 10 class.  They started by covering their page with charcoal and worked in reverse by rubbing away the lighter areas with a putty rubber, then using charcoal and chalk for details. 

Charcoal & Chalk Eyes

The large ey drawings done by my year 10 class.  I started the year off by doing these, as it is quite an easy drawing technique and the results are fantastic in my opinion.  It also gets them to consider detail very carefully.

I also did this drawing lesson when I was doing my teacher training placement in Glasgow.  This is the work from 2nd year students, I gave them the choice to draw any feature of their face. 

Textile Portraits

Students were asked to manipulate a photograph of themself and translate this into a textile piece as part of their GCSE coursework.

Students experimented with different techniques such as batik and tie-dye to make a background fabric. 

In Abu Dhabi we have lots of tailors and fabric shops, so I visited some of these and got bin bags full of fabric scraps.  In addition to this, we had lots of donations of old clothes, which have been chopped up and used.  The Art departments has boxes and boxes of fabric now!

We also incorporated use of the school’s laser cutting machine (I love it) to cut out lettering in different styles.  The fabric had been prepped before cutting, so had a glue surface on the back, and the letters were ironed on the surface.

To finish, students added embellishments, text and hand embroidery on top of their sewing machine work. 

Fabulous glasses!

Embroidered detail and buttons...

Numan used an actual shirt on his piece, I think it is really effective...

Beautiful hand embroidery...

 Hollie used real necklaces on her portrait...

I found these plastic frames in my room (I'm always finding random things) and they fitted perfectly onto Gemma's portrait of her grandpa. 

 The other person in the portrait is her grandmother...

 Lucy experimented with the different stitch settings on the sewing machine, which she used for detail in her hair.  She has also added some lovely beaded freckles...

 Andrew was incredibly neat with his embroidery...

On display in the school's atrium...