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Thursday 11 June 2015

Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly Collage and Painting Project




As a Canadian, learning about Australian art history and the history of Australia I found a personal interest in the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series. Within the series I saw a great opportunity to discuss both Australian history and art technique. This made for a great combination of learning that was engaging. The students got to use their prior knowledge of colour theory, as well as their new knowledge about the Ned Kelly paintings.  We spent a whole class looking a video of the series and discussing what we saw in them. Many of the students were shocked by the images and had a lot to say about what they were seeing.

In the technical side of things, I explained to them two main things. How to create a landscape (using the Australian bush as our inspiration) explaining about what a horizon line is and why it is important to the composition. The other main thing we talked about was perspective, where the trees and the Ned Kelly character are larger the closer they are to the front of the image.They got to choose where they wanted to put their Ned Kelly and how big they wanted it to be. This project used many mediums, and took us awhile from the drafting and planning stage, to the painting stage, to collaging the Ned Kelly character. It was all worth it when the students pieced it all together and added final touches of the trees and bush land with chalk pastel. 

Our main image we looked at from the Ned Kelly series was: 

Here is the work of the 3/4 Childern: 


















Tuesday 2 June 2015

Andy Goldsworthy Sculptures



With the year Fives and Sixes I wanted to run a project that was extremely hands on, involved using natural materials and taught the very important lesson of "it's ok to fail."

For the first two lessons we looked at videos and pictures of Andy Goldsworthys work within nature. I showed the students a video from the documentary "rivers and tides." In this clip Andy fails at making his sculpture. It falls from the tree. We discussed how we would act if our sculpture didn't work and why it was all about the process of the work, rather then the finished product. We also discussed why it was important to fail after we completed our project. Students responses were "I would not have made such a good sculpture had my first one worked" and "I had to think harder about how to get it to stand". These are very important conversations to have in order to build studentscritical thinking skills, that can come in handy in solving daily life problems! Yay for sculptures that allow students to be resilient to failure and to have the guts to keep trying. 







Some of the Finished works: