The Magic Dot: October 2016

Hi Everyone and welcome back to the Magic Dot!

The autumnal breezes are blowing softly in the art garden and all is cool.....including our amazing art work ! Lets take a look at what has been going on in our LP Art world this past month.

Our Reception Two Artistes

White Rabbit helped us to make some colour discoveries!

We discovered our Primary Colours!

Ask your children how Mr Smooth and Slow Hand helped us that day.

Then we used our Primary colours to make Secondary colours

Look how we made some more discoveries

R2 Living Canvas

When we had said goodbye to White Rabbit, we chatted to our art teachers about our lovely Secret Garden by the Artroom

Using our Secret Garden as a place to seek out patterns and shapes, we began a conversation about the shape of something we see all around us......Leaves

First of all we collected ideas of what we could remember about leaves......

Preliminary Memories

Then we planned to reality check our memories and go out into the Secret Garden to investigate, we planned to guide our attention by looking for certain specifics:

Size, shape, colour, edges, lines, and patterns.

After a quiet guided walk, we came back to the atrium and drew what we had seen and noticed, we called these our Memory drawings.

As you can see we gathered much visual data and peoples memories were very good, look at the shapes and patterns that we found above !

The week after we came back to art and talked about ways that we get our ideas when we draw, we established that we could use our :

Imagination

Memory

or our eyes.....Observation

This day was all about how to use our eyes.....and as a way to gather information we used our Magic Finger to trace around the leaf, gathering the outline, and size to guide our hand when we came to draw.

Watch this page for next steps!

Grade One Pattern Finders!

Do you know who painted this picture parents ?

Ask your Grade One children to tell you the name of the artist.

We searched for all the special features that we could see in his work.

Ask your children to tell you about Mr Klimt's tricks.

Shapes were clustered into shape families and often nestled inside each other.

Then we chose some sections of paintings by Klimt to seek out how the patterns and shapes work together. Everyone studied several sections, look at the amazing observational skills that your children are developing. They saw so much and drew the shapes so carefully, starting from top to bottom and keeping size and space in mind.

We gathered what we knew about the patterns on the painting of Adele.

Then it was time to prepare for our own Gustav Klimt painting! We started to prepare a canvas.

We painted a background, speckled with gold ready to make a portrait which will be a camouflaged by using Mr Klimts tricks, we drew a robed person in the style of Adele Blockbauer.

and the started to paint our person in Klimt-style camouflaged colours

Look, our figure is the same shade as the background.

Now its time to bring in our pattern drawing skills that we have learned before and use those on our painting. Watch this space for next exciting steps!

Grade Two Mandala Designs

As you can see, a compass is a tool to help us find our way......
Grade two art students have made compasses in class, to help them find their way too..
Marking out North, South, East, West in the sketchbooks they have started to prepare the way to making a very tricky circular design called a Mandala.

Ask your children which compass points come in between the first four....

Once they had all 8 x points in place, they began to make some shapes that point in all 8 directions.Then these shapes were decorated using various lines and shapes.
This is the very start of their Mandala, look at the amazing results !