FUNTIMES HOME EDUCATION

K has been drawing horses for sometime now and I have seen a huge change in the style of her artwork over this last year.  Just before leaving school last summer, her pictures of horses were very basic, simple outlines.  She now has a more defined style of drawing and, within the last few weeks, K is beginning to experiment with using her pencil to produce a more carefree type of work, with beginnings of shadings too.  K's drawings of people and riders have leapt forward as well, she is working hard to achieve the position of the rider in the saddle and is beginning to get the correct scale of rider to steed!

Here's a very small selection of her lovely work from 2006.

K has her own website too which can be viewed by pressing this link.

We were introduced to the paintings of Henri Rousseau by a member of the local HE group who had arranged a visit to the Tate Modern in London to view his works and participate in a workshop being held there.  Although we weren't able to go on the trip, we decided to have a look at his lovely paintings and create our own Rousseau style work of art.  We looked through several websites and found the link below to be the best for us as it had a good varied selection of his paintings and the text was easy for the children to read and understand.  Disappointingly we found just one book in our local library that featured a Rousseau painting.

The same lady also held a workshop locally for the group which we were able to go along to.  The children decided to produce a weaving based on Rousseau's painting named "Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)" (1891).  They carefully wove a huge variety of materials onto an old green plastic coated outdoor netting/fencing.  Once this was finished the children drew templates of jungle animals and birds (although K wanted to do a horse, which we turned into a zebra!) cutting out the figures from different materials to stick onto the weaving.  This, together with some pretty 3D effect climbing flowers and trailing trees completed the project which looked absolutely beautiful.

The lady is hoping to display the piece in either the local museum or at our Central Library.  Unfortunately we don't have any photos of the weaving, but here is a picture of the lovely paintings that K and B worked on at home.

K used paint mixed with shaving foam to produce an interesting texture to her work as it dried a little "spongey".  Her horses were surrounded by trees and golden leaves.

B used different shades of blue tissue paper together with silver foil to imitate a waterfall effect over his tiger.

Interesting links:-

http://www.class.uh.edu/courses/engl3322/tlbonnet/index.htm (information on Henri Rousseau)

http://www.tate.org.uk/ (home page of the Tate)

(work: Feb '06)

The anniversary of the birth Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan Jr., the Dutch painter, fell on 7th March.  We looked at his fabulous modern geometric paintings, but discoverd that his earlier work was mainly of landscapes .  He was known as Piet Mondrian and the style of his later work, which was mostly completed in primary colours, was called neoplasticism or "nieuwe beelding" in Dutch.  We discussed how this style of work was futuristic for its time and that it didn't really capture the imagination of the public, and therefore didn't really earn him much money.  His first one-man show of his work was when he was 70 years old, two years before him died, help in New York.

Enchanted Learning gave us a brief introduction to the work of Piet Mondrian, and the children had a go at the interactive painting board to complete their own abstract work.  We then designed our own Mondrain style paintings using lines and bold colours in oils.

 

One of the first original pieces of art that we did together was done with the use of Adobe Photoshop.  By using the "liquify" button on the Adobe Photoshop software we are able to smudge a photo or picture to resemble something else.  Once we were happy with our new formed picture we printed it out and then used an imaginative mix of materials and paints to recapture the picture in a different form.

We worked on this over a number of weeks rather than rush to finish.  By taking frequent breaks we found we were able to see more in our smudged picture than when working solidly for a length of time.

Ks picture uses poster paint, glitter paint, glitter with glue, wool and pipecleaners.

  

Bs picture uses poster and matallic paints, glitter paint, glitter and glue, wool, foam and felt tip pens.

(work: Nov. '05)

This was our summer 2006 project.  We planned to take a series of photographs on a subject of our choice and then use Corel Paintshop Pro X to alter the photographs and perhaps merge them together to form one collage.

This is turning out to be an on-going project!  We have successfully taken the initial photographs.  B's theme was bricks and K's things to do with horses.  Completing the second part of the project took almost another month and a half!  We had to learn all the tricks of merging, altering and adding pre-programmed effects to reach this stage.  Needless to say, K and B picked up these skills far quicker than me.  We are now working on the merging of photographs to form a single collage for each theme.

 
Bs photograph of house bricks, became this beautiful mosaic star.

 
Amazingly, this toy stable door that Ks took has turned into a sparling silver piece of art.

(work (continuing) - summer '06)