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: