Making a Splash!

We left the heights of a sunlit sky and took a dive under the water in the Art Room this week to explore a new, two-week subaquatic theme. Taking inspiration from brightly coloured Japanese Koinobori kite fish – a carp-shaped flag traditionally flown in springtime on Children’s day in Japan – our artists took up the challenge to design and decorate a fish however they wished.

Our preschoolers and their grown-ups layered tissue paper shapes onto a cardboard tube to make the body of their little fish and added carefully drawn eyes and ribbony strips for a tail. Once hung from a brightly coloured string their fish bobbed along a bubbly waterscape each child had painted with ocean blues and turquoise greens.

After school, the older children upped the scale of their fishy creations by working on large A2 sheets of paper to model a big, three-dimensional form. With free-choice from a wide range of materials, we saw washes of pearlescent paints, wax-resist techniques, bright pastel rubbings and shiny collaged papers employed by our artists in different ways to depict the sleek features and scaly markings of their aquatic creatures.  What a fabulous ‘school’ we all made!