Autumn Term – Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 Friday Art
This term in Year 1 we have been focusing on an artist called Alan Bean. Alan was a Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 12 and was the fourth man to walk on the moon. When he returned he was encouraged to paint his experience. His art evolved into a mixture of painting and sculpture as he used moon dust, parts of the Apollo 12 space craft and the Lunar Module to create his art. Our aims in Year 1 this term were to use different techniques to create a moon collage. We looked at and used Marbling, Printing, Layering and Observational Drawing throughout our lessons to create our final collages and they turned out fantastically. Well done Year 1!
In Year 2 this term our focus was on JMW Turner who was a Landscape painter, traveller, poet and teacher. He spent some time in Margate growing up and enjoyed painting the sea along the south coast including Folkestone. He was one of the first artists to take his work outside, most artists of the time would work inside studios. Turner became known as a painter of light as he would draw and paint outside in all weathers and different times of day. Our aim in Year 2 was to use new techniques to create a layered pirate print. We used Gelli Plate Printing, Observational Drawing, and a variety of textures and materials to create our own Seascapes, adding a final flourish of a 3D sail to our pirate ships in the foreground. The children enjoyed this and the their work was exceptional. Well done Year 2!
Finally in Year 3 we have been looking at prehistoric art. We focused initially on a piece of art called The Lion Man which has an unusual story, in that is was found in fragments in a cave in Germany just before the start of World War Two and then kept safe and reassembled after the war had ended. It is thought to be 40,000 years old and made of mammoth ivory. An experiment by Wulf Hein using the same sort of tools available in the Ice Age indicate that The Lion Man took over 400 hours to create. We talked about the sculpture and then we created our own using air drying clay. This was tricky as we were not supposed to break off pieces of the clay and instead tried to sculpt our own lion man from a single piece of clay and the tools we had. Our focus then became prehistoric cave art, we used techniques like carbon copy printing, which the children were amazed by, to create our own pictures of wooly mammoths. In our final lesson we tried to recreate our own cave art using textured paper and oil pastels and had the extra challenge of drawing with the paper on the wall. We had fun this term and produced some beautiful pieces of art. Well done Year 3!
