On the land

After our aquatic explorations of the past couple of weeks, we were back on terra firma on Thursday in the Art Room to seek out different subjects from the land on which we live.  Our Preschoolers travelled far and wide and found inspiration in the lush, green clearings of the jungle while our Afterschool artists stayed closer to home, creating works inspired by the season in our local park.

So popular was our Elmer session earlier in the term, we decided to revisit the home of this colourful elephant in our preschool class and made art works inspired by his wild group of friends.  Stripey tigers and zebras could be spotted in the jungle palms, hand printed by our little artists, along with colourfully painted lions, monkeys and giraffes. And brightly decorated paper bird puppets swooped around the Art Room to complete the cheery, tropical scene.

We had a particularly busy time in the afternoon as our artist were engrossed in two activities, to which we will return and complete next week.  In the first half of the session, we painted as a group to explore the basic components of a landscape – foreground, middle ground and background – and used perspective, light, colour and texture to build a composition in acrylic paints depicting the avenue of trees in Rothamsted park.

For the remainder of the time, we switched media to work with clay to model and design decorations to display during Eastertime.  Building on the skills we used at Christmas, the children were encouraged to create their own ornaments, incorporate the symbols of springtime and add texture and pattern to their pieces.  We can’t wait to see how all the artworks look next week when they are dry and ready to embellish with lots of colourful details!