Visual Arts Update

Welcome to the exciting world of the Visual Arts, I am Mel the new Art teacher at ECSC. It feels like longer than two weeks since I joined the College, everybody has made me feel welcome and the enthusiasm in lessons must be commended.

I am returning to teaching after a four year break following two decades of teaching Art and Technology in schools across Australia, in the UK and lastly as a Head of Year and Art at a leading UK curriculum College in Dubai. This wide experience has given me an appreciation of teaching approaches, cultural and environmental diversity and the ever changing needs of the students in my classroom. The innovative teaching approach at ECSC has me excited and I look forward to contributing to the curriculum development and providing students with an outstanding learning experience.

Skills and Subject Matter bring explored in Art-

In Term 1, Year 7 have been exploring the theme, Portraits. Time has been spent studying the placement of the facial features and learning how to refine these shapes so that they produce a realistic self-portrait. I am sure that all the Year 7 students will tell you that the face is one of the hardest things to draw. Once students had captured the facial details, they then introduced tone to their study. Showing the tonal range of where light falls on our face actually makes drawing a portrait easier. While we naturally see the shape of a person’s nose, cheek and chin from the way the light falls on the face initially it is tricky to draw what is shown without using line. Year 7 students have developed a good range of observational drawing skills within this task.

Over the last couple of weeks, students have been exploring the style of Howard Arkley and how colour can be used to show the highlights and shadows that fall on their face. With the move away from absolute realism students have been more confident in their exploration of tone in producing a self-portrait study.

Without giving too much away In Term 2, Year 7 students will continue to improve their observational drawing skills but they will also experiment with print, paint and sculpture. The aim in Art next term is to experiment with the scale of objects that we see around us all the time. It will be lots of fun and the only thing that will limit our exploration is our imagination.

Over the last two weeks Year 8 students have been exploring different aspects of the Australian Landscape through Mosaic; in total 3 landscape murals have been created, the Seaside and Ocean, the Bush/High country and the Outback/Desert. For this Mosaic project, students have had to make their own tiles by ripping or cutting up magazines. It is a challenging task as students have had to find the correct colours and tones within the magazine pages to make their animal or landscape look realistic. Students have been working in small groups but have needed to discuss scale and colour as a whole class in order for the individual elements to stand out in the whole mural. All the mosaic elements look fantastic and we are all looking forward to seeing the murals on the wall.

I do not want to give away too much information before the start of Term 2. What I can say is that the major assessment project for Year 8 in Term 2 will be a sculpture. Before making this sculpture all students will be challenging themselves extensively through creating realistic observational drawings and pen studies. They will also be experimenting with print and other media in order to understand and explore the elements and principles of Art. 

Please get in touch if you would like to know about Art activities you could be doing at home to keep developing your skills.

Happy exploring

Mel Broders