Mapping

After school art: investigating the space

| Rojo Art

IMG_1565

Back to Art Club today with quite large group and an expanded workspace.

This term I want to offer activities that encourage the children to always be looking with the eyes of the artist, exploring, collecting and documenting what they see. I have decided to use the art club activity room as the place to explore and over the next four weeks we will try and look at it with fresh eyes, perhaps discover things we haven’t noticed before and make some art that will share our findings with other users of the room.

Today we started with sketchbooks. The children closed their eyes then opened them, looked around and sketched the first few things they saw that they felt they hadn’t seen before. We tried lying on our backs to get a new angle on the space.

IMG_1568Next each child selected a shape from the table and explored the room, recording in their sketchbook the places where they found the shape in the environment. I’ve posted the sketchbook entries of a couple of the circle collectors.

Finally we explored the room again this time using viewfinders. We’d looked at how using the viewfinder was quite similar to using an ipad to capture an image. The children used the viewfinders to focus on particular areas of interest to them and to decide what to include in their drawings. They sketched in charcoal on white and in chalk on black. Here are some of the drawings.

 

After school art: journeys to school

| Rojo Art

The end of our ‘journeys to school’ project. This week the children thought about the surfaces they travel across on the way to school then created textured footprints to convey the feel and look of roads, paths, fields and mud. They then carried on experimenting with animal footprints.

I’d intended to work with them creating a huge map of their journeys to school using all the artwork we’d created in this project. In reality, there was so much to explore with the travel textures that we ended up exhibiting all the artwork on the classroom floor at the end of the session.

I feel that during this project the children have closely observed and thought about their journeys sometimes using them as a start of a fantastical narrative. At the end of this session the children invited their parents to view their art and talked them through their personal view of the daily school run.