Art Club for years 5 and 6 will be held in Heron Class.  Your lovely children will be ready for collection at 4:30 at the door of Heron Class (year 5) - the first door of the years 5 and 6 block.

Describe ‘n’ Doodle

This week, our artists had a go at playing a game we’ve called Describe ‘n’ Doodle. Working in pairs, one person was given a print of a famous piece of artwork which they they had to describe to their partner, who, unable to see the picture, translated the description into their own version of the artwork.  There was some gorgeous and productive teamwork happening, which produced some interesting and often particularly accurate results…

Sound Creatures

Continuing our exploration of different ways to visualise sound, this week in Art Club we have been using 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...

The Music Looks Better With You!

In Tuesday Art Club, we’re going to be looking at different ways to visualise sound.  As an introduction to this idea, we spent a whole session exploring a fantastic website called Patatap, which transforms a touch screen into a visual synthesiser.  Although the Chromebooks we used to access the site individually don’t have touch screens, Art Club explored the technology to the full and found multiple different ways of controlling its output to produce some excellent jams.  We could really spam this page with the amount of video footage we took, but for now, here’s a video of a few of us using Patatap on the class screen to see what sounds and images were produced by writing our names with our fingers…

In case you want to have a try at home, here is a link to Patatap, together with a few other music making websites we occasionally use in Art Club.  Enjoy!

Patatap

Incredibox

BeastBox

Tony B Machine

One Motion

A Close Shave With Some Cracking Creatures!

In Tuesday Art Club, we've been looking at the work of Richard Webber (a partner in Aardman Animations) and his company, Waaber, who specialise in stop motion animation.  To start with, we've been specifically using the subject of Waaber's still images from his Instagram feed - simple, but expressive modelling clay figures - as inspiration for the basis of telling our own single shot stories.  Art Club members have been modelling for one another to study how they might use the clay to replicate facial expressions and then giving a lot of thought to how they could pose their figures to illustrate a particular narrative.  They’ve also been thinking about composition and taking their own photos - one of our members even made their own stop motion animation! Everyone's had such a good time with it, they've been working on it for a few weeks.  Check it all out below…

Spring Term 2025!

We’ve been busy settling in our new members for the spring term; setting up our art books, updating our Spotify playlist and generally getting stuck in with our art work.  So far this term we have made self portraits for the covers of our art books, practised drawing cartoon faces at different angles and had a go at some basic animation by making flip books (to put our cartoon faces to good use).   The flip books have certainly been a challenge and it’s taken a Herculean demonstration of at least 2 of our school values to avoid slam dunking them into the recycling bin whilst tearing our hair out!  They have been labour intensive, to say the least, and as a result we don’t have much footage of them to share, but what we managed to capture is shown below.  Congratulations to everyone who had a go, I think we all learned something about ourselves from this task!

Christmas time, don’t let the bells end!

At this fabulously festive time of year we’ve been working on another awesome art form, our own Christmas song! After doing some (albeit extremely) brief research into what makes a memorable Christmas tune, using an online platform called Soundtrap we’ve been taking it in turns to select different loops to build our number 1 hit. It’s a work in progress, which will require some serious editing before it’s ready for public consumption, but everyone’s been having a great time testing out the different sounds and building up the layers of our track.  We’ll share it once all our musical ducks are in a row, and in the meantime you can see our budding producers mulling over their options below…

The Writing’s On The Wall

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at street art and graffiti and practising our own word art.  As we have learned, many street artists apply their trade with permission from the owners of the walls they bring to life.  However, as Art Club don’t currently have any walls available to decorate without finding ourselves in trouble with Mr Jones or local law enforcement, we have made our own! 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 interactive inspiration for your next tag or throw, have a go at the online graffiti generator provided by Graffiti Empire which you can access by clicking here.

Arte Del Recuerdo

In Art Club, we’ve been exploring the rich traditions of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a Mexican holiday that celebrates and honors loved ones who have passed away. The children have been learning about the vibrant symbolism and artistry associated with this special day, in particular the iconic sugar skulls (calaveras) and marigolds (cempasuchil), which are believed to guide spirits back to the living world.

Our young artists expressed their creativity by drawing their own sugar skulls, decorating them with bold patterns and colours that are typical of this beautiful celebration.

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

Tuesday Art Club have recently learned a little bit about collage and have since set about using various resources to make their own.  With absolutely no rules on what should appear on the canvas, everyone has been making some beautifully unique pieces which some of us have been working on for a few weeks now.

Kate Shaw

Monday and Tuesday Art Club have been looking at the work of Kate Shaw, an Australian artist who uses different paint techniques to make psychedelic landscapes reflected in bodies of water. First of all, we used watercolours to make our sunset backdrops and we then moved on to experiment with different types of marbling to decorate paper which we will use as our landscape features…

The Finished Article

After spending some time last week painstakingly cutting and arranging our landscape features, Tuesday Art Club have finally produced their Kate Shaw inspired landscapes.  Behold these psychedelic wonders…

All Art Club members have a self made art book to doodle, practice, sketch or to use however they please alongside any projects we may enter into.  We try to make different resources available each week so that they can experiment freely and we often have a video playing during our sessions giving us art tips or inspiration.  This week, we were watching a Halloween doodle video which we accompanied with a Spotify Halloween playlist - some funky moves and these lovely little artworks ensued…