Today we had a look at some bird feathers from budgies and cockatiels, we then chose some feathers to draw. The biggest challenge was to see if we could draw the feathers’ larger than they are in real life!
After we had drawn them our next task was to paint or colour the feathers in using monochrome colour schemes. The children could make complex or simple patterns, the only rule was trying to use just one colour and white to make tints of the chosen colour. We ended up with some awesome experiments with texture!

A couple of the children came up with their own experiments which were a bit different to the pictures above! One child had a go at painting a feather realistically and another decided to see what it would look like if they painted the background of the feather, leaving the feather itself paint free.

We will be creating some art to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee next week and the 10-13 year old group will be joining us as Strutts will be closed from Thursday next week for the Jubilee.

Today the children spent the first half of the session colouring in and making some fairies to add to the display we are making out of the fairy grotto picture the Wednesday group created. We will finish them off next week.

During the second half of the session we began our second mini project. We are going to create some books based on the theme of travel. We’ve got some interesting ideas such as a book about footballers for Manchester United and where they came from and a concertina book showing all the places it’s creator has been on holiday. We also did some mini collages of places abroad. The children had fun trying out different ways of making books and planning an idea for their books.

We are going to continue with our planning next week; testing out what materials we wish to use and creating the images we want in the book. We will also check we have enough pages in our books for what we wish to do.

This week we have been exploring the idea of warm and cold colours by making silhouette paintings of animals. We used warm colours to make backgrounds for the animals from hot climates and we used cold colours to make backgrounds for the animals from cold climates.

Next week we will be exploring monochrome colour schemes with abstract paintings or drawings of feathers (the children will have the choice of paint or pencil crayons).

Today the children had loads of fun exploring mark making with paint. The session started off with them exploring using different mark making tools such as paper plates, masking tape, brushes, cardboard, mixing different materials in paint such as salt, different types of sponges and splashing water on wet paint.

Then one of the children had an idea for an experiment, they placed a stencil on the paper and started dripping lots of different colours on top of the stencils to see if you could see the animal shaped once the stencil was moved. This experiment resulted in a vibrant mix of colours with a marbling effect marbling. They noticed you could make out the shape of the moose’s antlers, otherwise it was hard to make out the animals. Next they placed the removed stencil on a clean piece of paper to see what mark would be left behind.

After this the group decided to continue with the idea of dripping paint on paper to make a collection of interesting and vibrant paintings. One of the paintings also had bubble wrap mark making worked into it (first image to the left below) and another had a small paper plate dinosaur stuck on top of rainbow rain (far right, below).

Overall the children had a lot of fun experimenting with acrylic paint, especially creating drip art. Next week we are going to choose the topic for our next mini project. The project will be focusing on making small illustrative books with some text as an exploration of illustration.

We spent today’s session finishing off our Fairy Grotto picture. Most of the children managed to complete their part of the Grotto. They enjoyed thinking up ways to use collage materials and pencil crayons together, such as collage dresses for fairies with pencil crayon bodies or shiny wrapping paper pond surrounded by pencil crayon gnomes and grass. One of the children also thought it would be fun to add a dragon, specifically an ender dragon, as well as a portal from minecraft.

Next week we are moving on to making silhouette pictures and learning about warm and cold colours. We will also add to the unfinished parts of the grotto during the last part of the session.

This week the children made the finishing touches to their canvas paintings. Once they were satisfied with their art they then spent the second half of the session making bracelets. They enjoyed looking through the bead box and choosing which beads to use.

Next week we are going to have fun exploring and experimenting with mark making with paint.

For the first part of our session today everyone made beautiful fairy bracelets!
Each person chose a main colour for their bracelet and then they chose a second colour that was either opposite or next to their main colour on the colour wheel. The white, silver and letter beads were free for everyone to use. With so many lovely colourful beads it was hard to pick which ones to use!

For the second part of the session we started making our fantastic fairy grotto collage!
Everyone enjoyed working together and planning where to put the houses, trees and fairies. We will be continuing our fairy grotto next week!

Today we continued with our canvas paintings, adding more details and the background to the paintings. The main bulk is more or less done and we should easily finish them off next week.