St. Patrick's P.S. | Artist Journal

We focused our attention this week on the wind. P3 had been investigating wind strength and wind direction, so just before the start of our online session, the children had been outside to FEEL the wind on their bodies for themselves. Today was a very windy day!

Our discussions began by talking  about the wind effects and I showed them a painting by Paddy McCann

Paddy told me that the painting was about standing looking in one direction for too long! The wind had worn away his face. The children offered some interesting responses to the image and one child told the class that he had taken a kite up to  Slieve Gullion at the weekend and had to hold on tight to his father’s hand because the wind was so strong!

We began a discussion by offering up all the WORDS describing what the WIND does.

Mrs Hughes listed the words as to whether they were USEFUL or DANGEROUS or both!

GUSTY,  BLOWING,  HURRICANE,  TOUGH,  SUPER FAST , FLOATING,  OUT OF CONTROL, GALE FORCE, SPINNING, CONTROLLING YOU, PUSHING, LIFTING, GLIDING….

I ASKED THE CHILDREN IF THE WIND HAD A VOICE HOW WOULD IT SOUND?

CHATTERING, MURMURING, WHISPERING, WHISTLING, SHOUTING, SCREECHING, SCREAMING, YELLING, ECHOING, SQUABBLING….

Mrs Hughes had recorded the children outside and also the children had recorded the SOUND of the wind. I hope to link to these videos shortly.

We thought it might be interesting to see if we could VISUALISE the WIND by drawing its different strengths. However first of all we had a look at a WIND MAP. During the week I sent Mrs Hughes a link to a website that interpreted the wind direction all over the globe! However if you scroll the globe, you can focus in on Ireland and watch the wind streams, crossing the country. 

http://www.gaelforceenergy.com/blog/?p=185

It was amazing as Mrs Hughes could swivel the globe around on screen and view the weather as it hit the coasts of Ireland and then swivel to countries the other side of the world! The children enjoyed watching this and gave us some inspiration for our own drawings.

These were made using graphite on paper and by responding to the words that the children had offered describing the VOICE of the WIND. So we began by mururming, then working up to a full gale force angry wind!

   

   

      

  

    

      

We had a look at how other artists had responded to windy skies.. Dutch artist VINCENT Van GOGH ( 1853 – 1890) made these wonderful paintings.

The children used the techniques they had experimented with last week to create wax and graphite resist paintings of their own windy sky.

   

   

   

   

I really enjoyed seeing these works via the online camera! Thank you P3 they are beautiful!

 

    

   

     

The children said they felt happy when they were painting the wind with watercolours, that they enjoyed this new experience with paint and one child said he felt like he was flying as he painted the wind blowing!

Mrs Hughes quickly made a display for these works.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

We first spent a few minutes discussing the work we did last week and how we did it… under tight control and then in preparation for the EXPERIMENTS IN WATERCOLOUR, we talked about the qualities of the watercolour paint and how we found out that we could allow the colours to run or ‘bleed’ together, how interesting effects were created by letting the paint move from one part of the paper to another. One child said the paint ‘SURFED’ the paper, causing a colour mixing effect!

Today we wanted to EXPERIMENT and see how we could use the paints to PAINT THE SKY! P3 were studying the weather at the minute so this linked in so well with the subject.

Our aim was to try a few TECHNIQUES and then use what we learned to paint the sky.

We used TESTER pieces of watercolour paper and first tried painting a WASH.

The children tried this for themselves, a couple of times so that they knew what they were doing. I was guiding them from the screen.

TAKE A PIECE OF PAPER AND WIDE BRUSH AND AFTER MIXING UP ENOUGH PAINT AT A TIME, TAKE THE BRUSH LOADED WITH WATERY PAINT AND PAINT FROM ONE SIDE OF THE PAPER TO THE OTHER, STARTING AT THE TOP AND WORKING DOWNWARD.

YOU CAN TILT YOUR PAPER AS YOU DO THIS, TO HELP THE PAINT RUN DOWN. YOU TRY TO COVER ALL THE PAGE.

   

   

On the second attempt the children tried using tissue tor cotton wool to DAB OFF some of the paint to see what sort of effects it created.

   

      

     

    

     

Next we tired different ways of using the brush…

TAKE A CLEAN PIECE OF PAPER AND A DRYISH BRUSH WITH PAINT ON AND TRAIL YOUR BRUSH FROM ONE SIDE OF THE PAGE TO THE OTHER. DRAG THE BRUSH OR ROLL IT….

GREAT RESULTS P3!

    

     

    

     

    

    

     

Another TECHNIQUE is WAX RESIST and for most children this was a totally new experience.

USING A WAX CRAYON OR OIL PASTEL MAKE LINES, SHAPES OR MARKS OVER PART OF THE PAGE. THEN TAKE A BRUSH LOADED WITH PAINT AND PAINT OVER THE CRAYON MARKS… LOOK WHAT HAPPENS!

After break the children told me the sky over CROSSMAGLEN was:

GREY

PATCHES OF BLUE

WHITE SUN BEHIND THE CLOUDS

Mrs Hughes said the were excited to try the learned techniques to paint the sky.. look at these wonderful skies….

     

    

      

     

    

    

   

    

   

   

     

    

    

   

I didn’t get time to show the children some other artists work, but here’s some more watercolour skies……..

First Joseph Mallord Turner who liked to sketch with watercolour out in the open air.

 

Also this amazing painting by Seán McSweeney who lives and works in North County Sligo.

Here I found an interesting interview with Seán made by young people in Sligo a few years ago. Have a look at the link. Seán talks about how he gets his inspiration and how important it is that he looks at the world around him.. the sea and the sky.

 

http://themodel.ie/weblog/young-model-interview-san-mcsweeney

 

 

    

The return to our project about feeling kicked off today exploring the idea of CONTROL. This came about because in the feedback on some of the activities before Christmas break, the children had said they really enjoyed the FREEDOM of painting and drawing what they wanted… with no-one telling them what to do.

I was interested in looking at this idea more closely and thought about contrasting FREEDOM with CONTROL. Such things as PAINTING BY NUMBERS and COLOURING IN activities came to mind.

Mrs Hughes and I agreed to work with an image I had prepared and emailed through to the class to be photocopied twice for each child. The children were to colour these in.

Before we began we had a discussion about the picture itself and about the word CONTROL.

THE CHILDREN SAID:

Its a picture of mother nature…

Maybe it was made on an iPad app…

They didn’t think a child made it…

It was drawn from a photograph…

It was a picture of a sunset and a mountain…

Then we tried looking at the picture just as a collection of different shapes… how many shapes could we count? What sort of shapes were they? IRREGULAR we discovered!

And what does CONTROL mean?  The children thought….”everything in its place”

“in charge’, “like a robot”,  “by force”, “a remote control”

Mrs Hughes said  that I was the REMOTE CONTROL because I was going to give the class  a set of strict instructions to colour the picture in. They were NOT ALLOWED to choose their colours and they HAD TO colour in without going outside of the thick black lines of each shape. So we began …

First dark green, then light green, then light and dark blue….. vary the pressure used to go lighter on the page…

All the time I was reminding them REMOTELY to KEEP CONCENTRATING and DO NOT TALK!

There was a bit of complaining going on that it was hard work!

   

     

     

     

    

Actually it was really hard work! Some children said it was difficult to stay inside the lines. The children showed me their work… I am not sure that these are the happiest faces holding up their pictures? Do you think they look a little grumpy?

Then I showed them my work…

After break we tried again to COLOUR IN the picture, using the other copy but this time we were going to use WATERCOLOUR PAINT, WATER and BRUSHES.

I encouraged the children to use LOTS OF WATER and they soon discovered that the way to make a LIGHTER shade was to add more water to the paint. The other thing we discovered was that the water really soaked the paper and this made the paper very easy to rip or tear.

Here’s a selection of the children’s work:

   

    

   

    

We like the differences in these works and the effects of the paint…

Here’s some more:

Next we used REAL WATERCOLOUR PAPER instead of copy paper and printed image.

The children said the paper felt stiffer and less bendy than the other paper. they thought it wouldn’t rip when water soaked in.

 

      

      

We ran out of time and so we hope to continue our exploration of watercolour and its effects as it relates to our project!

 

Here’s the P3 display showing the similarities and differences that we explored…

       

       

       

     

 

 

     

Our opening discussion focused on PLANNING since we were doing our best to be organised to design and paint our wrapping paper…

We looked at other DESIGNS like wallpaper and saw how shapes and colours were used:

We refreshed our memories about the COLOUR WHEEL and the PRIMARY and SECONDARY colours and learned a new name for the colours that sat OPPOSITE each other on the colour wheel: COMPLEMENTARY COLOURS.

We discussed the idea of COLOUR CONTRAST and that we could design our wrapping paper using shape and 2 colours that stood out from each other. The planning thing meant that we should paint our BACKGROUND first and let that dry, then design the pattern.

The children selected a colour from the colour wheel, mixed and painted their white sheet of paper.

   

        

       

       

       

       

The children named their colours…

Dino green, blackberry pie, ocean blue, shadowy orange, gold, mint, jade, flower purple, pepper green……

Reflecting on what we had done the children said they enjoyed painting the sheet because they could paint where ever they wanted …crazy all over the sheet!  Now we just had to wait for the paint to dry overnight and continue our plan tomorrow.

As ‘homework’ I asked the children to look out round their homes for PATTERNS….

In the morning we connected again online and the children told me they found lots of patterns everywhere. From curtains, wallpapers, sofa covers to the Crossmaglen Rangers football shirt!

So our task was to DESIGN a pattern then draw it out and paint it…. we had no time to loose! Christmas was coming and so was the Christmas dinner and early lunch! So with Christmas jumpers and hats all on the children set about exploring SHAPE AND PATTERN using cardboard shapes I had cut out and sent in the post.

3 minute small groups COLLABORATIVE task:

Work together to create a ‘picture’ with 3 different shapes.

Look at the great ideas!

       

We still had a lot of testing out shapes and patterns to do and next we tried PATTERN and TESSELLATION – this we discovered means leaving no spaces or gaps between shapes when they were repeated.

    

   

   

While Mrs Hughes was showing the children some TESSELLATION patterns on the computer, I noticed a Christmas creature trying to get a peep!

      

Playing with shape was really interesting and eventually the children settled on a design / pattern for their own paper, then tested out the colour pattern too….

     

    

      

Here’s some pictures of them working up the shapes onto the background paper and painting with acrylic paint because it was brighter and dried better.

    

    

    

   

    

    

    

     

     

 

 

 

 

more to come….

Our exploration of FEELING is continuing this time looking at the idea of EXCITEMENT (well Christmas is coming….!) So our online session began with a discussion about excitement by asking: how we knew we were excited?

One child said they felt they were so excited they were going to pop! It reminded him of a trip on a roller coaster!

We discussed the opposite of EXCITEMENT and came up with sad, scared, frightened, dull.

I asked each child if EXCITEMENT had a colour, what colour would it be?

a Rainbow

Blue like the sky

Green like army toys

Red like Santa

Pink  – a good light pink

We looked at a familiar object and the colours used which look very bright and vibrant….

We looked at an artist who used a colourful PALETTE….

 

We looked at an artist who used the OPPOSITE of a colourful palette…

I told the children that artists use a thing called the COLOUR WHEEL to help them ‘play’ with colour. We decided to make our own..

We  discussed the term PRIMARY colour and placed these on the drawn circles we had prepared….. Then we began mixing colours…..

 

 

We learned that mixing two PRIMARY colours next to each other on the colour wheel would create a SECONDARY colour! Some fabulous new colours were made. We discovered how to make a colour seem BRIGHTER and how to make a colour DARKER. Look at the fantastic range of shades made from the colours !

      

      

We decided to name the colours – a bit like paint samples do to sound exciting and describe a colour…

Later after class Mrs Hughes sent me a video of the children naming all their colours – what a fantastic idea! Here they are:

Miranda Purple / Purple of our school jumper / blueberry pie / magenta purple / New Holland Blue / custard blue / bristol blue / navy / matto / wood / fire / junior / senior / sun / cookie /dark green / fabric green / dark green  / blue green / lime green /peasy green / limey cabbage green / blue green / warm green / croc green / John Deere Green / Jungle green / current  green / diarrhoea green /shirt blue /golden purple /dinosaur green / croke orange / crocodile green /

And….I got a great lesson in tractor colours!

Thank you to all the children, Mrs Hughes and all the helpers on the day!

 

In the first session we saw how we  used our sense of touch better when we could not see something. Now we wanted to see what would happen if we restricted our sight and touch to  focus on hearing.

We all tried this by covering our eyes and putting our heads down to concentrate on the sounds that could be heard wherever we were.

In Belfast I heard: cars outside, the clock ticking, the hiss of electrical things, heater…

In Crossmaglen the children heard:

The projector fan

whistling noises… the wind?

knocking

feet tapping

other people breathing

After the sharing these sounds, we talked about how we don’t hear them when we are in the class usually because other noise drowns them out.

 

The children reported that they heard their hearts beating, blood flowing, air trying to get out of ears, breathing sounds, bones tingling, buzzing noises. It was amazing to sit quietly and calmly and listen to our bodies!

Next we talked about if we could FEEL sound and tried by experimenting with paper and our voices. We felt the vibrations in our throat when we hummed and held paper to our mouths to see what happened…

I suggested we might try to draw the feel of the sounds we heard in our bodies and in the classroom.

I found a piece of music and sent the teacher and children a link:

This is the  MUSIC  I chose – it was a classical piece and we did not tell the children the name of it or anything about it.

here are their drawings made while listening the the music.

  

  

  

   

What a great warm welcome I received in the P4 Classroom from the children and their Teacher, Mrs Hughes!

Our project takes as its starting point: FEELING….

I introduced myself and showed the children two drawings I had made – one from 10 years ago – as sort of self portrait with a dress:

We had a wonderful discussion about ‘feeling’ after I told the children the drawing featured a partially drawn dress which I had worn every summer for over 20 years… and finally packed it away – it was made of linen and embroidered with colourful flowers but had become very threadbare….

I even found the dress and brought it along to show the children…

      

I explained I had good feelings and memories attached to the dress but it was also drawn as a way of saying ‘goodbye’ to my youth, so feelings were both happy and sad.

The children enjoyed touching the fabric and talked about linen and how it was made and that it had a good feeling for your skin as Mrs Hughes said it helps your skin breathe….

The second drawing was one made more recently about running and moving or more specifically about not being able to move…

On this real visit as we discussed ideas and undertook activities, alot of ideas and interesting thoughts have been raised….  One of these thoughts offered by Keighan,  asked whether FEELING (when we touch something) has anything to do with FEELING that we feel inside (happy, sad, etc).

We tried some activities that explored the idea of NOT BEING ABLE TO TOUCH SOMETHING. First the idea of not being in touch with the paper or the drawing tool so half the class used charcoal on very long sticks, drawing on  paper taped to the floor and half the class used pencils attached to shorter sticks at the table.

           

I had suggested to the children that they should not draw anything specifically, but  just explore making marks and lines… At first we made our marks very very light…

then very very dark…

Putting the sticks away, the children were happy to actually get their hands dirty and touch the paper and charcoal with their hands!! Interestingly the children said they enjoyed the freedom of making any  lines and marks they wanted… no one told them what to draw…..

      

We next tried moving around the classroom without touching anyone else or any furniture or art work!! Very tricky in a small space…

Our last activities involved using a blindfold, so we covered our eyes and drew something we couldn’t see……. we tried to respond to the texture and shape and the feeling it gave us…

   

   

   

   

   

   

      

         

Finally the children had brought into class an object from home and we mixed all these up so that they wouldn’t be able to guess what they had to draw… the results were very interesting.

   

   

   

   

  

Thank you P4 and Mrs Hughes!

 

P2 & P3 class proudly present Wrapped Yard…………………….

Huge thank you to:

All the Children

Irma the assistant

Mrs Crummy the teacher

Mr. Madine the headmaster

It was so much fun and very memorable way to end our project!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday 16th June……….. the date for P2 / 3 to wrap their playground!

The weather forecast is good……

The excitement is building…..

I hope I can get the huge roll of bright coloured paper out of my door, into my car and down to St Patrick’s Primary School Crossmaglen!

There’s a few breaks in the roll and I have had to secure with black gaffer tape…. There looks like a familiar pattern emerging………

Unbelievable!

I made a real visit to work with P2/3 and Mrs Crummy to finalise our work to be displayed along the school corridor. The children had decided at the last session that they would compose a letter to Mr. Madine and that I should also write a letter! Today was a bringing together of all the work and finding a way to present it to everyone.

Our discussions began with remembering all the things we had done so far…..

Mrs Crummy printed out some photographs of our explorations and journey and the children each wrote something to go along with the image for the display.

We discussed what order these should all go in and so the children laid their work out in a line along the floor of the classroom in order to get everything correctly positioned in relation to what we did and when during the process. It was a great way of revisiting  and remembering all the hard work and fun we had along the way!

 

I had remembered to bring along the books on Christo and these were scrutinised by the children in great detail….

 

          

Mary reads out the P2/3 letter to Mr Madine to the rest of the class and to me!

 

Here is the letter I wrote to Mr. Madine:

 

Dear Mr Madine

 

As you know I have been working with P2 / P3 and Mrs Crummy on the latest phase of the Virtually There project. We have been exploring ideas around the theme of ‘Pattern’. Our explorations have come a long way and in order to conclude our project we have worked towards the idea of wrapping the playground that the children use.

We would like the opportunity to explain to you what we are doing and show you all the work and research undertaken which has led us to this idea. It would take a long time to explain to you, fully in this letter, so we would like you to visit our display that will provide you with the background to this project and further details.

We have been inspired in particular by two artists called Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They were a husband and wife team who proposed and created some of the most wonderful public art projects of the last decades. They were internationally known for such projects as the wrapping of a whole coast in Australia in 1968/9 and the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin 1995.

 

All of these projects took a lot of planning and sometimes the projects were not realized because the authorities did not grant permission. We are therefore presenting you with our ideas in the hope that you might grant us permission to wrap the school playground.

 

Some of the reasons why we believe you should support our proposal are summarized below:

• The wrapping of the playground would provide an interesting means by which we could collect patterns of movement of those who use it. This relates to our explorations about pattern. We would be able to see footprints and marks of movement and weathering patterns.

• We are very excited about the idea of doing something very unique and spectacular. We believe that the playground would look amazing and would create a lot of interest particularly in the whole school community and beyond.

• In 1976 Christo proposed to wrap the walkways in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, but this idea was never realised. Eventually Christo brought this idea to fruition in Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri, USA in 1978. We therefore like the link to the proposed Irish project and as a follow up to that unrealized project, we wish to re-ignite a similar idea by wrapping the school playground.

• You may recently have seen the images of the Temple of Hope in Derry – a public art event in which a beautiful wooden structure was built and finally burned. Such a project involves a huge team effort and the value of a project such as this, lies in its collaborative nature, as well as the potential to create a memorable experience. In wrapping the playground – a project that the children have imagined, and researched – it has the possibility to create a rich experience and retain an after-image and positive memories, long after the project itself ends.

We all look forward to welcoming you to the display and P2/3 classroom to discuss the project. I know you have a busy schedule but hope you can take some time to consider this proposal positively.

 

Very best wishes

 

Sharon Kelly

IMAGES OF OUR DISPLAY