Visual Art program

Visual Arts at Plenty Parklands Primary School

The Visual Arts program at Plenty Parklands Primary School, encourages the development of imagination, creativity and skills in students by exploring concepts and experimenting with a range of art forms. Students’ ideas are inspired by themes studied in the classrooms, books, artworks, personal experiences, observations and feelings about themselves and their world. In our art room there are no right or wrong ideas, and each lesson aims to give students a chance to experiment and play with creative concepts as we value and foster imagination, creativity and original thinking.

What’s been happening in the Visual Art room?

This term the prep students were introduced to the Visual Art curriculum and have been exploring a range of materials that can be used to make art. The students have created beautiful self portraits and have also explored how books can inspire artworks through reading Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems and then drawing and painting their very own pigeon. They have also explored the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault and creating an artwork using letters of the alphabet.

Year 1 students have been working on learning about the art element of line in order to create compositions. The children have created beautiful contour leaf drawings using soft pastel coloured lines. The children have also been learning about Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky and how he explored colour through circles in his work. The children learnt about concentric circles and created their own concentric circle colour studies. They further developed their understanding of circular shapes in art by developing a bird collage inspired by the work of artist Lisa Congdon.

Children in year 2 have learnt about the technique of continuous line drawings to create their own owl illustrations and have also been learning about the French artist Henri Matisse. After viewing and discussing the work of Matisse, the children created an interior artwork of a room with a fish bowl. Exploring the shapes, lines and colours that Matisse incorporated into his works. The students have also been working on their community building sculptures as part of their integrated unit on places and spaces.

The year 3 children enthusiastically shared their love of nature and their feelings about the Australian bushfires when they created their painted hearts and trees artwork, inspired by the work of artist Jim Dine. Students have also explored the work of artist Henri Rousseau and his jungle animal works. The children created mixed media collages of jungle animals by exploring gelli plate mono printing. The children and I had a fantastic time experimenting with the gelli plates to create interesting textures on paper that they used for these collage compositions.

Year 6 students began their term exploring the art element of value through the creation of self portrait artworks wearing sunglasses. They each used a photograph of themselves to help them create their artworks. After exploring a variety of colour schemes, the students focused on using complementary colours to render the values in their face with oil pastels. They then explored how symbols and patterns can be used to express ideas about identity within their sunglass lens. The students are now currently working on designing and building a figure sculpture using plaster and aluminium foil based on the work of artist Keith Haring, which we hope to have on display early in term 2.

Laura White

Visual Art Teacher