Monday 16 June 2014

Burton Primary become Art Superheroes!

Burton Stather Primary year ones returned to 20-21 last week, to prove that they are, indeed, Art Superheroes! Two visits in one year? That's enough qualification for us to strongly believe that this school really value the arts, and their children were very excited to design and make their Art Superhero capes, in honour of that!
 

The day started with some art challenges for the whole group. How quickly can we all become artists? How many pieces of work can we create in one minute? How many objects can we find in our classmates' squiggle drawings?

The answers? We all became artists in a matter for two minutes. We created three pieces of artwork each and we found numerous objects in our squiggles - including a Smurf's hat!



We stuck a load of our quick-fire drawings to the windows, to use as inspiration for creating shapes and pattern later in the day.


Once we had our art head's tightly screwed in place, we took a trip around the gallery, splitting into small groups to complete some worksheets created especially for the class.


Each child chose their favourite piece of artwork out of our current exhibitions; Alison Stockmarr's Face Book as seen above, in our Linear Gallery, with our Gallery Assistant.


George Hardy's Faces (above) were popular because of the sheer talent in using biro as a drawing tool.


And finally Alexis Rago's Chaos Contained which was the favourite of many of the pupils, for it's weird and wonderful sculptures.


The children worked really hard to answer the questions and recreate their findings in the form of a sketch, which encouraged them to think about shape, 3D object and size.
 
 





Here are two of our favourite recreations of Alexis' work:



In the Link Gallery, we spotted Miss Clarkson taking a gallery selfie with some of her pupils! This is something we greatly encourage during visits! Who doesn't love a gallery selfie?!


Back in the education room, it was time to get our designer heads on. We decided who we might be as Art Superheroes, using Paint Girl, Super Splodge and Clay Spray as examples. We discussed what the term "design" means and what a designer might do.

It was explained that designers start with what's called Initial Designs, so the children began there's, thinking of shapes and logos that might represent who they are as Art Superheroes. We drew a lot of paintbrushes, bubble writing and lumps of clay, like in Alexis' work.


The initial designs, were then perfected on a second drawing, using larger, simpler shapes. These were to cut out to use as stencils for our screen printing.



Burton's year ones got to use some of 20-21's specialist equipment; our silk screens! The pupils learned what a silk screen was and what it might be used for. We used them to recreate our designs into Art Superhero capes, with our logos on the back!

Some designs worked better than others, as unfortunately, some children got a little carried away with the clean up, resulting in some of the papers being thrown in the bin. However, we think they look really abstract and unusual.


The paintbrushes look really striking!


And the lines came out crisp, framing the designs really nicely.

 
 
All in all, everyone seemed to have a great day, giving us more evidence that Art Superheroes is still one of our most popular workshops to book. Get in touch with ways we can drop in your class topic, and prove that your school are Art Superheroes, too!
 
 
For more information, contact us on 01724 297070 or email education.2021@northlincs.gov.uk