Grassy Scene with Insects
Today I worked with two classes, Ross and Sally’s, to get our calendar art finished before the end of the term. Alice, another one of the superstar teaching team at our school, helped me teach the lesson. The lesson we taught was the beautiful sgrafitto and collage garden scenes that I have been creating with the senior school. The students made vibrant scenes of insects nestled in long grass. Later on in the year families will have the opportunity to order cards, diaries, sketchbook and calendars with their child’s beautiful artwork on it.
There were two components to today’s artwork that needed to be completed before our morning break. The first piece of art was a variation on on the pottery technique, sgraffito. Sgraffito means ‘to scratch’ in Italian. It is the process of adding glazes to pottery and then scratching them off to reveal contrasting colours, patterns and textures underneath. The students coloured their paper with warm coloured pastels, working hard to fill in the white spaces. Next they painted black acrylic paint over top. I like to add a drop of dishwashing liquid to the black paint to help it scratch off easier.
The second piece of art was to prepare the grassy green background. They did this by by painting the entire page in yellow and then layering different greens over top. They then used the paint scrapers and skewers to add another layer of texture. Later on in the day the students glued ripped pieces of green paper on top to make wavy, textured grass.
The students looked at images of garden insects and drew plans for their own critters. Some students imagined brand new species, others did observational drawings of real mini-beasts.
Alice and I had a fantastic day working with the senior students to complete their art. They were super motivated and took a lot of time and care when making their artworks. It was an absolute pleasure teaching them today. Not everyone finished their artworks because of the time spent on the intricate details so the students are going to finish them off in class. I look forward to seeing all of the final products, they are going to be stunning.
Here are some of the finished artworks, I will update the post when the rest are finished.
