Term 3 session 7

Our warm-up today involved drawing a bird with indian ink and a stick. This task lead into the days main activity; mixed media birds on the texture canvas paper we prepared last week.
The process:

1. Draw a bird with pencil onto the prepared textured paper. Add a simple background (ground, branch leaves according to habitat).

2. Using white pastel carefully colour in the bird and background feature. (This needs to be quite thick)
3. Chose a paint colour (habitat dependent) and paint all the paper except the bird - leave it white. (One child painted over the bird and it did not look as effective as the others.)
The paint needs to be watered down to the consistency of liquid dye. I did not use dye because it would seep into the grooves and the feature of the painted paper was some of the grooves (texture) stayed white.

4. Paint around the bird and the background features with thicker paint of the same colour, adding the darker tone.

5. Lastly, go around the outline of the bird with indian ink. I was not going to do this final stage, but after completing the birds, they needed something to make the bird stand out more.

I demonstrated the process and the children became the artists and created their own composition. They were amazed at their creations.

Term 3 session 6

The collaborative art, Green Eggs and Ham, has been finished (much to my delight). I now have the problem of displaying it.

Todays warm-up was drawing the negative shape around bird drawings using indian ink and a stick. This medium gives different dynamics to the effect it gives in the drawings and children gain more confidence when they know they can not rub out. They tend to take more risks when applying the lines.
One thing to watch our for is if the children tap their stick on the side of the ink container after dipping, it tends to flick and can go onto other peoples work and everything else close by. (Paint shirts are a must).

Last but not least, we prepared our canvas for next week. The canvas paper has been covered with tissue paper and watery PVA glue. This creates a lovely textured base for our painting because it dries very hard. To be continued...