Art Club for years 1 and 2 will be held in Sparrow Class.  Your lovely children will be ready for collection at 4:30 at the door of Sparrow Class (year 1) backing onto the school field. 

Who Let The Dogs (And Other Animals) Out?!

Thursday Art Club have been taking a look at the work of William Wegman, an artist and author whose muses are his brood of Weimaraner dogs.  As well as William’s often hilarious posed photographs of his dogs wearing clothes, he has also written a range of children’s books featuring canine characters called Flo and Wendell which are illustrated with photomontage images.  With these illustrations in mind, we made our own pictures of “anthropomorphised” animals…

Sound Creatures

Thursday Art Club have recently been thinking about different ways to represent sound visually by listening to audio prompts to guide our drawing of a mysterious creature.  Using the 5 different tracks as inspiration, we had the option of choosing to combine our visions into one fantastical being or draw 5 separate figures, each conjured up in response to the noises we were hearing.  As you might expect, a marvellous menagerie unfolded, but we sadly only have one surviving photograph of our zany zoo - more may follow!..

Clay Time!

In Thursday Art Club, we recently explored clay modelling tools and techniques with some salt dough.  As we were each using dough made from different types of flour, in addition to our investigation of the effects we could achieve with the different tools, we were also able to compare the varied textures and colours. 

Can We Fix It? Yes, We Can!

By popular demand, Thursday Art Club have been exploring different types of assemblage using hole punches, card and various different fixings.  This week, our choices also included collage and working on our art books.  Take a look below for some of our fine efforts…

A Mixed Bag

As part of our carousel of activities at the start of February, at the request of our members, Thursday Art Club were able to choose from watercolour painting, tin foil modelling or just having a lovely old draw in their art books.  Although not all pieces of artwork may have made it home, Art Club produced some beautiful paintings and some really adventurous and imaginative tin foil sculptures. 

Spring Term 2025!

So far at Art Club this term, we’ve been busy settling in our new members, setting up our art books, making mosaics and trying a little bit of mixed media artwork.  The whole group have got really stuck in exploring different media to see how they interact with one another in an open ended task, learning all the time that not only is it good to make mistakes, it may not be a mistake in the first place!  You can see some of their results below.  It’s probably worth mentioning that lots of our members like to keep their work in the art books they’ve made, so if you don’t see this gorgeous work coming home, it’s at the artist’s request!

Sculptures of Anything Goes

In Thursday Art Club recently, we’ve been looking at some different sculptures, thinking particularly about “assemblage” and exploring different ways of assembling our own sculptures.  With various fixing options available, we spent a long time designing and cutting out parts for our sculptures before deciding on which fixtures would be best for the look we wanted to achieve.  Take a look at our hard work and some of our results…

Tag!

In Thursday Art Club, we recently had a look at street art and graffiti and had an go at making our own word art.  Take a look at our gorgeous tags (artist signatures, often initials or nicknames) and throws (longer or more detailed than a tag), they could well be the seedlings for some future public “pieces” (larger than throws and with lots of colour and additional art).  If you’d like some inspiration for your next piece of word art, have a go at the graffiti generator provided by Graffiti Empire, which you can access by clicking here.

Skooshitay, skooshitay, skoosh!

After watching a video of the world’s biggest fireworks and discussing how we might draw them, Art Club made some gorgeous displays of their own.  After making a choice whether to use chalk or brand new oil pastels, those who chose the pastels used them very carefully and they went back into our art cupboard as beautifully packaged as when we had found them. Once we’d finished, we watched a reading of Fireworks at the Castle, by Matthew Fitt, which you can watch again here.

We’re freeeeeeeeee to collage whatever we, whatever we like, if it’s wrong or right it’s aaaaaalright!

This week Thursday Art Club learned a little bit about collage and then set about using various resources to make one of their own.  With absolutely no rules on what should appear on the canvas, everyone made beautifully unique artwork…

David Hammons

Thursday Art Club have recently looked at some of the work of artist David Hammons, who produces his artwork by pressing parts of his body coated in grease onto his canvas and then uses powdered pigment to highlight the sticky imprints.  Returning to some of our cave art activities we created our own pigment dust by crushing different coloured chalks.  We then put Vaseline on our hands and pressed them down onto paper to make interesting greasy shapes - we used different coloured paper to see how this affected our results.  Tune in next week to see how they turned out.  In the meantime, check out the process in action…

Cave Painting

For the last two weeks, Thursday Art Club have been thinking about cave painting.  After reading Julia Donaldson’s Cave Baby for inspiration, we took a look at some of the earliest pictures ever made by humans and talked about how they may have been made and what was shown in them.  We then went into our very own Sparrow Class caves and had a go at cave painting ourselves.

The following week, we learned a little more about how cave painters may have made their paint.  We talked about what pigment means, the different things early humans would have used for theirs and also what they might have mixed their pigment with to paint it onto the walls.  We then found similar substances - charcoal, spices and chalk - crushed them with sticks and mixed them with water to make a paste to use on our cave walls (aka a piece of cave coloured paper).  Although the group wanted to go full stone-age and grind the pigment in their mouths before spitting them onto their surfaces, we decided against it for reasons everyone understood!  Take a look below for the Flintstone-tastic results…