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: 

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:

Colour Theory Unit

The first thing I thought about when getting this position, was what are some base skills that the students need to learn in order to create successful art pieces and projects this year?

The answer that came to my mind from my art training was colour. While there are many other elements of art explored in this unit including form, texture, line and shape..colour was the main focus. I believe that once students young or old start to understand colour theory then all projects both in 2D and 3D have a higher level of success. 

The wall of my art room, has grown a lot more colourful since my first post! Each year level helped me sort the pencils and markers into different colours, and put them on the counter as a cool/warm colour banquet for the students to easily access for the rest of the year. The bonus of doing this gives them control of their own supplies, and the ability to get it themselves. It also solves the fighting over colours problem that comes from having the colours at different tables. 

I started each year level in a different ways going through what primary, and secondary colours were, testing their prior knowledge! Most students had little or no knowledge of these. After we figured these out, we then talked about warm and cool colours, as well as colour buddies (complementry colours).

This gave us our base for our unit( and the rest of the year!) 

In foundation and 1/2, this was our source image:

The Foundations made crayon and watercolour resisits:

And then framed them, and added their name sticker! I was very pleased (and so were the students!) in how they turned out. 

The 1/2s created paper circles, (see classroom makeover post) and used another one of Kandinskys images to create a crayon and water colour shape composition.

The 3/4s looked at warm and cool colours (and patterns) in melbourne graffiti:

The 5/6s used different Keith Haring images to source their work using complementry colours:

The students really enjoyed this project, as they got to add their own twist to it. Our school has many Samoa students in it, and they did a great job of adding symbols from their culture into their work. 

This brings my colour theory post to an end, but I know the future work by the students at this school, will reflect their in depth learning of how to use colour.