Imaginative artists create lockdown masterpieces
Artistic pupils in the Lower School have been developing their creative skills with a range of colourful and inventive lockdown projects.
Third Year
The theme for the Third Year project was ‘Bugs and Beetles’. The artists used various media and techniques to study them and deployed a number of illustrative methods – including the grid method and the Zentangle method.
Amongst the artists whose work the pupils have referenced is Levon Biss. Levon is a photographer who has produced a series of works with The Natural History Museum that capture bugs in microscopic detail.
Head of Art Mr Richard Davies also created a number of demo videos to help pupils.
Resourceful pupils also used items from their kitchen cupboards to prepare the surface for biro beetle observational drawings. They used natural colour pigments such as turmeric, tea, coffee, paprika, food colouring and beetroot juice.
Second Year
Second Years covered a range of artists and themes in their work.
Pupils completed a research task on artist Patrick Heron before creating portrait designs that were developed in online live lessons.
The budding artists also looked at the work of mixed-media artist Teesha Moore, who is known for creating visual journals.
Pupils worked with string to create relief portraits and frottage – the art of taking a rubbing from a textured surface – and created pieces from single line drawings.
First Year
Still life drawing was the focus of the work for First Year pupils.
The young creatives produced pieces informed by the ‘Master of Silence’ Giorgio Morandi, an Italian painter and printmaker whose paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting apparently simple subjects. The pupils were challenged to paint or draw cans – bearing in mind viewpoint and ellipses, light and shade and how to make items appear 3D.
The still life theme carried on with a scavenger hunt and photography challenge.
Pupils also created Monet inspired artwork – namely the French painter’s ‘The Japanese Bridge’ piece.
