Year 1

Term 1

This term we have been busy building on our skills of colour mixing. Mrs Clarkson rolled out huge sheets of paper onto the tables and we used ready mixed paints to look at mixing primary colours to discover secondary colours. She also challenged some of us to see if we could make our green paint darker by only adding yellow or blue.

After that we looked at watercolour paints and experimented with mixing those together to see if we could make the same colours. We also used wax crayons and candles and painted over them to see what the effect would be. We discovered that we could still see the drawings even after we painted over them!

Then we looked at some pictures of landscapes and talked a bit about proportion and where the sky is. We then used wax crayons to draw clouds, suns, rainbows etc and painted over the top using watercolour paints.

Mrs Clarkson showed us the painting ‘Burg and sun’ by Paul Klee. We talked about what the painting reminded us of and which shapes we could see in it. We then created our own buildings by drawing around rectangles and squares and adding on little windows. Some of us also cut out triangles to make a roof.

Miss Munday took photos of us pretending to be superheroes. Finally we got to use all of the shapes we had made and we stuck them together to make collages of superheroes flying through the sky. We all drew emojis to show if we enjoyed trying out the watercolour paints over the wax crayons.

Term 2

This term we have been doing work to do with the seasons. We started off by drawing huge squiggle drawings. We then looked at doing continuous line drawings where we weren’t allowed to take the pencil off the page. We looked at drawing natural objects like leaves, pine cones and sunflowers. We had a go at using drawing pencils and charcoal.

After that we looked at the work of artist Vicki Rawlins. She creates portraits by drawing and collaging sticks, leaves and flowers. We talked about which one of her portraits we liked the best and why. We then had a go at drawing portraits of someone of our choice. We decorated them using pictures of leaves and flowers as we had already created some leaf collages during class time.

Next, we talked about what will happen when we mix primary colours together. Mrs Clarkson showed us how to create a colour wheel and we talked about the colours in a rainbow and the order that they go in. After that we created our own rainbow pictures using wax crayons and watercolour paints.

Finally we listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. We talked about what the music sounds like and how it makes us feel and then we drew whatever we liked whilst listening to the music.

Term 3

This term we have been experimenting using a wide range of tools for drawing such as soft pencils, charcoal and pen. We have explored mark-making and have learnt to make different textures by using our drawing tools in different ways. We watched some films about birds and did some very quick sketches of them thinking about the different shapes that we could see.

We then further developed our drawing skills by doing some observational drawings of feathers. We tried doing some blind drawings which was when we could see the feather we were drawing but had to put our paper in a bag so we couldn’t see our drawings. Our feathers didn’t look perfect but we learnt to carefully observe what we were drawing. We also looked at how drawing on different papers can have different effects. We thought the tissue paper was quite difficult to draw on because it was bumpy but we quite liked the sugar paper.

After that we looked at lots of different ways of turning paper from 2D to 3D. We looked at the work of origami artist, Hoang Tien Quyet and discussed how he made his work and how much detail he chooses to include or leave out.

After that we made feathers using all sorts of different materials. We cut them out and then made a 3D bird which we stuck the feathers on to. We all really enjoyed creating our bird and learning how to make 3D art.