The Blind Man and the Hunter Prints

Following on from the story 'The Blind Man and the Hunter' we have explored in art how the blind man might visualize the world.

We etched our images onto printing foam, and using light block print coloures we then printed these onto black card. The black represents the darkness of being blind.

The results were very impressive and you can somehow imagine how coloures and images would appear in the blind man’s mind.

Here's a slideshow of our work:

Varjak Paw story maps

Varjak has just arrived in the city. We've been busy creating story maps.

We've created some great maps!

Have a look at a slideshow of us working, and the great results:

Urban Landscapes - L S Lowry

L. S. Lowry (Laurence Stephen Lowry) was an English artist born in Lancashire, in the North-West of England.

Many of his drawings and paintings depict Pendlebury, the place where he lived and worked for more than 40 years.

Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in industrial cities in the mid-20th century.

He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes that show simple human figures - often referred to as "matchstick men" due to the way he painted them.

We looked at some of Lowry's paintings and chose one to copy.

We had already looked at drawing cubes and cuboids in Maths and we had to think about 'perspective' to give our pictures the feeling of depth and that some buildings were further away than others. This was quite tricky, but we tried hard and we have created some lovely work.

Some of us even had time to be inspired and sketch and paint our own urban landscapes in the style of L.S. Lowry!

Easter activity with DST

Today we had an enjoyable time making Easter cards with DST.

Here are some photos of us at work together:

Cartoons

To finish off our half term, and our reading of Mouse, Bird, Snake, Wolf, we drew some cartoons of the story. Here are some of 4G's:

Here's some more:

A big thank you to the author, David Almond, and the illustrator, Dave McKean for their wonderful book, so full of so many things! Thank you to them too for following our progress and encouraging us:

@Simon_Gregg This is such a wonderful project!
— David Almond (@davidjalmond) February 6, 2015

@Simon_Gregg @davidjalmond Too good. I'm out of a job.
— Dave McKean (@DaveMcKean) February 6, 2015

Our... Mice, Birds, Snakes, Wolves

We've been collecting leaves, sticks, berries, stones... and yesterday and today we've been making some creatures with them with Miss Whittaker.

Here's a slideshow:

My Wolf

My Wolf

During my snow day at home I made a wolf out of pine cones, feathers, sticks and a carrot. I like him very much because he is not scary but very cute.

Meanwhile the gods...

Up in the clouds

the gods

were relaxing

 and complementing each other:

Our rainforest

Thanks to Miss Whittaker, our rainforest display in the corridor is looking brilliant! There's the leaves we printed, the animals we painted, and some of the first poems we wrote:

Filling Holes

In David Almond and Dave McKean's Mouse, Bird, Snake, Wolf the children see holes in the world the gods have made.  And they can see things in those holes, things that take shape in their minds. Little Ben sees a hole and a creature gradually takes shape in his mind - a mouse!

We imagined what we might see in holes left in creation. We made the images of these creatures appear inside our heads, and created pictures in the style of Dave McKean.

Painting rainforest animals

We've got a lot of leaves now. A lot. So it's time to put some animals into the picture. Here they come...

Leaf Art

We have been showing the children some different Art techniques for adding texture to leaves for our ever-growing rainforest.

They used a raised template for printing the veins on their cut out leaf shapes, we found that the green and white paint looked more effective on black paper.

We also experimented with Monoprinting, we rolled paint onto a surface, paper is placed on top and is then drawn on, transferring the paint onto the paper.

Andrés enjoyed paint trailing on his leaves.