December Artfulness at LP!!!

Happy Christmas everyone from the Merry Old LP Artroom !

Mrs Flowers and Mrs Kirk say

Happy Holidays !

R2 Nature Artistes

Your wondrous R2 Angels have been very busy finishing up their study of leaves in our Artroom garden, they have been learning to use " High School" brushes and use a slow hand and keep steady.

Just look at those careful hands ......

Blending our colours to match what we could see.....

Matching up the right green, using our previous knowledge from the White Rabbit colour project.

Then we blended colours to make a garden background for our special leaf.

and into the garden it went!

    

 

 Just like the real thing! What marvellous Nature Artistes we have here in R2 !!

Grade One

Have completed their utterly amazing Klimt Canvases....

These amazing pieces will be coming home to be mounted in a place of honour in your own home around Chinese New Year.

In the meantime, alongside their classroom unit examining the question:

"What is a Scientist " Grade One's have been studying ........

You ask them !

See if they can tell you the name of a scientist who studies insects !

Can they tell you what determines or defines an insect ?

What body parts do we share in common ?

Look at these amazing scientific drawings :

and then we looked very closely.

In both art and science, understanding and learning are both deepened based upon careful observation of the world around us.

 some very huge beetles!

Watch this space for what comes next !

Design and Observation

by Grade Two

The Mandalas are now finished and adorning the walls of our school :

Look at the gallery 

Having learned how to be creative designers, inventing motifs, embellishing lines and edges, these grade two artistes have gone on to develop anther crucial art skill, that of OBSERVATION

Learning to draw is Learning to see

Learning to draw is Drawing to learn

In both science and art there exists the potential to use of drawing for discovery and research as well as for representation.

Following up on the Grade Two Habitat Unit, Mrs Kirk and Mrs Flowers followed in the G2 footsteps and took a walk down to Tai Tam Tuk, looking for the small details and images hidden in the natural world along the way.

We brought back a series of photos that we could use to discuss the concept of zooming in !

 Students studies a series of patterns continued in our photos

Using the power of the big artroom screen we were able to identify many of the unseen details as we noticed, hairs on leaves and shadows in the background !

Turning these into sketch collections

We are blown away by the intensity of focus your children showed through out this project and the incredible accuracy and detail shown here reflects that.

I am sure they will be telling you about all this at home !

So everyone, enjoy your Christmas adventures

hope you all get to do or see some art!

and see you once again in 2016

Artfully Yours

Mrs Flowers and Mrs Kirk

November Nature Detectives and more!!!!

Bookoween came to the Art Garden 

Ask your Grade 1 students which artist Mrs Kirk and Miss Flowers  have portrayed in our costumes ?

HINT!!!!

Reception One 

Nature Detectives 

Continue their tireless search for pattern and shape! 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.

Then we prepared to start drawing the shapes we can actually really see......

Just look at what your children have observed here....

People were able try out all many strategies to try and attain these new shapes.

The next week we recapped and decided we were ready for a "Nature Detective Challenge"  We looked at the enlargement of these three leaves on our big screen for 1 minute and then discussed similarities and differences, revealing how much we can absorb in just one minute!!!

We then practiced identifying and naming the component parts together ......

This what we found....what a lot of detail and just look at that pattern made by the leaf veins ( having established that those are the water pipes for the leaf) 

Next we were ready to tackle this complex leaf pattern for ourselves, so we used our "Nature Detective Equipment " along with Magic finger to investigate.

Then the drawing could begin......

Just look at all the interpretations of our leaves......so much detail

These are being outlined, ready for watercolour next week....

Watch this space

Grade 1
Searching out designs with Klimt

You may recall that Grade one kids were using paintings of Adele Blockbauer by Gustav Klimt to study pattern and design, they then used the painting "The Kiss" as inspiration for a self portrait.

So we have painted our shape and now the time came to put our Observational Skills into practice while we designed the gorgeous magical clothing using our Klimt segments.

 Looking very carefully, great observation!

Building up the design in layers

Then using the special " Drawing with Scissors method" people have begin to create the luscious clothing you see right here......again, building the design in layers and using Klimts concept of same colour camouflage to select colour choices.

 

By the time you see this project one more time you will be able to recognise your own child 

Grade Two
Circles within Circles


Having grown and completed our central segments of our Mandala's

  
We branched out, continuing to count in 8's and continuing to use the points of the compass to guide us.beginning with our 8 main shapes then allowing our "Design Brain" to embellish each of the 8 shapes in an identical manner. Once again observing children engaged in this repetitive pattern making, we watched as they became completely absorbed and melted quietly into the rhythm of the process. Very calming and meditative.


Using various colours of paint pens to decorate each shape, searching for complementary shapes to fill the right spaces, balancing the weight of thick and thin lines, contrasting dark shades and colours that add light and vibrancy to their design.





This project really enables your children to surrender to the flow and all students no matter what their confidence level with handling fine motor skills, have found ways to be highly successful......just look at the results so far !!!

Watch this space for final finished mandalas next month

in

The Magic Dot

from
Mrs Kirk and Miss Flowers