Painting and Mixed Media- Prehistoric Art.

And so we come to the end of another half term. I cannot believe we are half way through the school year! This half term, our focus has been on painting and mixed media in the form of Prehistoric Art. The children have had so much fun exploring what mixed media is and how it could be used to replicate a cave painting. Through combining painting skills with pastels, charcoal and the creation of their own homemade paint using spices, flour/water base along with lentils, rice and couscous to create textured pieces of art. The use of natural resources, has helped the children no end to understand how and why Prehistoric man created paintings. We finished off with a collaborated handprint cave wall using negative and positive prints working in small groups. Next half term, we will be moving on to craft and design.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo

I cannot believe we have arrived at the end of the second half term! What a wonderful term it has been, as we switched our attention to Design and technology and Textiles. We have had such fun exploring the techniques of applique and cross stitch, with the outcome of designing, planning and making a cushion using the techniques learned, within the design criteria. The children have been so resilient, as sewing is such a tricky skill to learn. Their patience and determination in completing the tasks has been so humbling. We would like to thank the parent helpers, who came in to share their skills with the class. I know that the children found it a wonderful and helpful experience. Thank you so much for all your assistance!

It has been an absolute pleasure working with your children and I cannot wait for the New Year, where we turn our focus to painting and mixed-media!

Have a wonderful, magical, Holy Christmas

God Bless

Mrs Mather

Growing Artists!

We have had a wonderful time in art this half term, focusing on our drawing techniques to produce various botanical pieces of work. From observational drawing, shading, frottage and scientific study to produce amazing pieces. The children are such wonderful budding artists!

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

Artists in year 3 were very busy and have leant so much about how artists see when they draw or paint-shapes. Everything around us is mainly made our of a shape or to be easier to put tin to paper they can use shapes. Year 3 looked at how we can create tone in drawings by shading and how we can hold our pencil in a different way from writing/detail (pencil grip)and how texture can be created and added to create art, we use the technique called frottage which is taking a rubbing from textured surfaces to form the basis of a work of art. The term frottage was created by the artist Max Ernst. We did botanical drawing and have explored different parts of flowers and did some closed up sketches, following this we created our own flower collage ( has Henry Matisse once said": “ drawing with scissors”) experimenting the difference between rip and tear in this artwork. We have inspired a lesson by Georgia O'Keeffe and did some abstract paintings of zoomed up flowers using watercolours and adding detail with fine liners, this was a very successful technique.

"Creativity is contagious, pass it on!" - Albert Einstein

In year 3, we started our food tech learning all about how eating seasonally can help our environment, we have looked at how different seasons affect the growth of different fruit and vegetables and looked at a world map where we could see where some come from.

We tried some Japanese grilled fruit kebabs with plum sauce, it was different but oh my it was tasty!

We had a chance to make fruit crumble and with this really look at the ingredients we were choosing, having in mind our country seasonal fruits when out shopping for ingredients. We then baked some tarts using seasonal vegetables this time, the art room as like a mini farmers market, it was lovely to see the children taking ownership and being independent with their designing and preparation. These tarts smelled amazing and were so easy and low cost to make!

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced." - Vincent Van Gogh

What a busy term in year 3! In art we have travelled back in time and looked at prehistoric art, starting by learning how the pigments for painting came from. We looked at cave paintings and these were drawing with little detail. The artists were asked to draw common British animals in charcoal and later to enlarge them on to an A3 size using only cave painting colours, we knew that cave painting people only had natural resources and not a great variety of colours, we used a more earthy colour wheel.

The artists went on a hunt outdoors for natural resources and were able to experiment which would give a nice pigment when painting with. Year 3 had a go at making their own Prehistoric palette by mixing flour and water and by adding different condiments we obtained different colours, we used paprika, nutmeg, turmeric and cinnamon, some worked better than others but they all smelt amazing!

The children created their own cave wall to paint in, for this we used cardboard as a base, we glued sand, couscous and lentils and once dried we were able to add our favourtite British animal, we had so much fun doing this.

To end our term we did a virtual visit to the caves in France “Chauvet cave” and looked at the hand drawings and tried to recreate our own hand paintings , positive(paint on hand to print) and negative (hand on paper and paint around hand creating a negative hand print). This was very messy and children really enjoyed the process!

Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it."- Salvador Dali

This term the year 3 artists have been very busy.

We looked at Paul Klee’s art , in their sketchbooks using coloured paper (choosing 2 primary colours and 1 secondary colour), year 3 created their own version of one of Paulo Klee’s famous art piece-“ Highways and Byways”.

Following the same technique (now using black paper only), in our sketchbooks the artists in year 3 tried to make some optical illusion pieces inspired on the artist Victor Vasarely. We researched about this artist and his art work, we were all amazed by Victor Vasarely art.

Together we found out all about sustainable art and how important it is for our planet and environment, we decided to upcycle everyday packages that would eventually go in the bin to each create a piece for a Christmas village, it was amazing to see the children’s ideas on their sketchbooks and there were so many great ideas! Because we were all in the Christmas mood we started our Christmas cards, children were encouraged to create their own using any techniques/mediums that they would prefer.

Year 3 Artists also did their own nativity scene using a glass window technique. We had to cut silhouettes and the stable, we have found this tricky but we persisted and we had amazing art pieces.

On our final week we looked at observational drawing and together discussed the key principles of drawing someone’s face. We looked at how splitting the face into sections and making sure the ears section has the eyes, eyebrows and nose will help us get the features as accurate as possible. We then sat opposite each other and tried to draw our friends, these were amazing and the children were so focus!