Visual Arts

Communicating with the Specialist Team

We look forward to partnering with you in 2021, and welcome your input:

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

Congratulations to Tristan and Hannah who were selected to be visual art captains for 2021. Make sure to keep an eye out for some creative art activities they are planning for the whole school to get involved in. 

On Saturday 13th of March Upwey High School in collaboration with Upwey Primary school ran their annual festival day and Streeton Art Show. This is an opportunity for local schools and students in our area to showcase some of their work. 

I'd like to congratulate Eve C for receiving first place in the Year 4-6 category

and

Reuben B for receiving 2nd place in the kinder-prep category. 

An Overview of our Learning

Foundation students completed their mixed media butterflies last week learning a vast array of art skills. By using food dyes student could see how two primary colours dripped onto their butterfly mixed together when folded and squished to make a secondary colour. This piece also gave students an opportunity to practice cutting, painting, drawing and pasting skills to create a finished piece.  

Students also completed a guided drawing of a clown, giving students an opportunity to practice following directions and paying attention to detail. They build upon their painting knowledge by carefully painting inside the shapes in their clown, practicing brush control. 

Students completed their abstract art piece inspired by Australian artist Melinda Harper. These fantastic vibrant artworks focused on shape and colour, each one unique despite the common inspiration. 

Students then switched to oil pastels, designing their own fun castle. Drawing from architectural traits common in castles such as turrets, towers and draw bridges but used their knowledge of abstract art to create fun, colourful designs to the exteriors. 

Students did a fantastic job with their expressive patterned animal piece, drawing many different patterns and painting these sections to further emphasize their designs. It was great to see so many unique patterns in students work, experimenting and refining their designs as they went. 

We continued our look at the elements of art by creating cool and warm modern landscapes inspired by Georgia O'Keefe's landscapes. Students learned about colour so they can identify cool and warm colours to create contrast and practiced landscape vocabulary to create a foreground, middle ground and background. 

Year 5 and 6 students have begun their main portfolio piece using watercolour paint. Students enjoyed playing with a variety of techniques including blowing, bleeding, oil pastel resist and especially the salt technique. Students have used photographs as reference to draw a contour line of their chameleon and used the techniques they learned to begin adding texture and colours.