Visual Arts
Contact: Allanah Sarafian - asarafian@srprestonwest.catholic.edu.au
St Raphael's School
Foundation
Over the last 2 weeks the Foundation students have been practicing a paper craft technique called fringing. This is a great technique for adding line and texture for artworks. The students tried 4 different fringing techniques; straight, curly, zig-zag and short. They glued their fringing onto an animal to represent its hair. Once the classes had mastered these 4 fringing techniques, they made more fringing to add hair to a hairy creature. These creatures were painted a few weeks ago and are now complete.
Year 1/2
The Year 1/2 students have spend the last fortnight making beautiful pictures of the sun. Each lesson we spend time discussing shapes, colours and lines we can see in different artworks of the sun - then the students use some of these shapes lines and colours in their own work. These works made by the students last week show an image of the sun that uses radial lines. Radial lines are seen commonly in pictures of the sun and always branch out from the center of a shape. These pictures were made with coloured tissue paper and PVA glue. The students made a flat layered background with strips of tissue paper, then created a raised texture of the image by twisting, folding and pinching tissue paper and gluing it down.
Year 3/4
The 3/4s are working on pictures that show different emotions. Last week the students painted a textured background for their artwork. They each chose an emotion and a colour and a texture to represent that emotion. The textured items included sand, string, tissue paper or found natural objects like dried leaves. The students glued the objects onto A3 paper with PVA, then painted it with a monochrome colourway. Monochrome means one colour or shades of one colour. The children chose one colour for their background and mixed in black or white to create shades of that colour. The next step will be to sculpt the face of a person showing the emotion being represented.
Year 5/6
The Year 5/6s are completing a very exciting unit on microscopic landscapes. I planned this unit in tandem with Ms. Julie the Science teacher. Last term the 5/6's explored mold in science and we are extending that research in Art this term.
Over the last fortnight, the students have created a close-up sculpture of a "microscopic landscape". Each student was given a painted Styrofoam ball glued to a paper plate to represent a dome of mold in a petri dish. They then bent, shaped and twisted pipe cleaners, wire, beads and pins into organic lines and inserted them into the ball to make a colorful explosion of lines and textures. They then observed and recorded the organic lines they could see in their work and used those lines to design a microscopic organism which might live in their petri dish sculpture. The next few steps involve making a collagraph and a foam print block of their creatures. Every students' foam print will be stamped onto a giant petri dish (a 2m diameter bubble printed paper circle) to create a super-zoomed closeup of microscopic organisms living in a moldy petri dish.
