The focus of today’s activities would be on understanding further balance, counter-balance, direction, movement and alignment, and using this knowledge to draw.

Sharon surprised the children by posting some photographs on our whiteboard of themselves, taken from the previous session with Professor Murphy.

I used a large floor brush to enable the children to see how straight their poses are, how stable they are and if the can identify the centre of gravity in their own pose; and to further explore the idea of balance and counter-balance, so that if we lean forward in one direction, we need to counter-balance this with a movement in the opposite direction, in order to remain stable.

We revisited our Chinese characters on screen from our first session which resembled people balancing in a yoga or martial arts pose!

We looked at the direction and flow of the shapes which the children made using their bodies and we tried to recreate these shapes on paper.

We used blotting paper and watered down black paint first to recreate the flow and direction of the movements we made.

Sharon introduced the children to what is known as the ‘scribbled mass’ technique. They tried to keep the scribble CONTINUOUS as they attempted with a great amount of success I might add, to recreate the pose or silhouette of the shape which we made with our bodies earlier.

We then used graphite sticks and drawing paper to create our scribbled mass. The results were very effective and we made a wall display. Photos of the display can be seen on Sharon’s blog.