Visual Arts

Communicating with the Specialist Team

We look forward to partnering with you in 2022, and welcome your input:

Danielle Haines (Visual Arts)  danielle.haines@education.vic.gov.au 

Congratulations to Logan Kotze and Taya Holmes on their appointment of art captains. I'm looking forward to working with you both on some exciting projects and art installations throughout the year. 

An Overview of our Learning

The last two weeks have been all about the art element of colour for Foundation students. Our initial experiments with food dye consolidated our understanding of primary colours and what happens when 2 primary colours mix together. FA expored red and yellow, while FB explored Blue and yellow.  Finally, students were able to complete their butterflies by painting the remaining area with watercolour paints and some glitter for a bit of sparkle before adding a final backing paper and cutting the whole thing out again. In just 3 weeks it's fantastic to see how far their cutting skills have come, with many students showing a significant improvement. Thanks to the art captains for helping me to put these beautifully colourful butterflies on display. 

This week we continued our exploration of colour by meeting the colour monster. A friendly creature who has mixed up emotions. We practiced making different expressions we use when we are feeling a certain way and began a drawing of our own colour monster, choosing what kind of expression our monster will have to show how he's feeling. Students are excited to paint their monsters next week to show the colours of their feelings. 

Our gardens are growing and have an abundance of new thriving flower species.. This has been a tricky project for many, with fiddly details and cutting skills required to achieve a lush garden. It has also given students an opportunity to explore the materials, see what the paints can and can't do, breaking the rules and flicking paint on their work, paint the sky a different colour, change the direction, cut out a tricky shape and all sorts of other things to develop their curiosity. 

Year three students have cemented their knowledge of primary and secondary colours with their balloon project and backed this up by introducing tertiary colours to their colour wheel. These colours require a primary colour and secondary colour which are next to each other on the colour wheel to be mixed together. Students coloured a 12 part colour wheel and created a paper snowflake by folding it up and cutting out pieces. This fun little project has been glued into their Art books as a reference to their learning of the element of colour. 

This week we began a new project, examining Indigenous landscape paintings. These , often aerial views represent places of significance to their people, so students will choose a place of significance to themselves and create and aerial view using google earth as a guide. This change of perspective incorporates shapes and lines of roof lines and buildings. Many students were surprised at the view of their house from the top when we searched them up and are looking forward to getting started next week. 

While these works are still in their final stages of completion, I couldn't help but share them with you. I am so incredibly proud of the progress everyone has made this week as our painted papers are being cut up into a plethora of Australian wildlife. The challenge now for all the students is to allow themselves to be pushed to think about changes, or additions to their work. Just like any challenge in life, strive for the best and be willing to experiment. We don't always succeed but when we do, it can take you to the next level.