At Barrow Primary School today working on an Art Branches led arts and environment project. The Woodland Trust have sponsored Art Branches to run a competition and series of workshops that encourage people to connect to their local trees.

After an assembly to launch the competition we worked with years 3 and 4 using art techniques to look more closely and explore some ideas about winter twigs and bark.

I worked with some enthusiastic groups looking for and drawing the shapes and patterns in the negative spaces between bare winter birch twigs. The children looked at their drawings from all angles deciding whether they represented twigs and trees or whether they had taken on another form. We discussed the similarities between the twigs and other networks such as rivers, roots and veins of the circulatory system.

The drawings were coloured highlighting either the positive or negative spaces or in a way that reinforced the ideas the children wished to express.

At the end of the morning we left the school with a drawn record of all the twigs the children had identified

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Storm Doris left us with a trail of winter twigs with early buds strewn across roads and gardens and plenty of ideas and materials for this terms art club.

Twig ID

Scroll observational drawing

Very long scroll drawing of twigs

Observational drawing and material exploration

We started with The Woodland Trust‘s winter twig ID sheet. The twigs were tricky to identify at this time of year but the close looking helped observational skills noting layout of buds, presence of catkins and, the children’s favourite, the stickiness of the horse chestnut bud.

I had prepared long scroll lengths of paper and supplied brush pens filled with diluted ink (a new tool for the children) and watercolour pencils and encouraged them to make observational drawings of the twigs using the length of the paper.

Some of the children used magnifying glasses for close looking identifying patterns and an array of colours within the bark and buds.

In the second session I brought short cut lengths of twigs that would be painted and become a material to use for 3D work the following week.

We started with some colour theory, mixing bright primary colours in acrylic then set to the painting. This simple painting task offered a calm time to talk about the relative vibrancy of colours, how the paint transformed the twigs (would we look at them differently) and what size and shape twigs would we need to make the 3D work.

As the children finished painting I asked them to look at the underlying paper: what shapes and images could they find; what happened if they turned their paper?

Figure, snake and waterslide found in the paint

Paint patterns emerging from activity

Monster emerging

Bird flying out of discarded brush stroke

The following week I demonstrated joining the twigs with wire and talked about making a hanging or free standing structure. The children joined their twigs to create tree or birdcage like structures using the more pliant materials to create curves. I was very impressed by their achievements but photographing the delicate structures proved very tricky against the classroom backdrop.