Crafts in Coventry #2

As promised, here are a few photos from today's workshop with KS2.

They made storybooks...

...and headdresses...

...and everyone had a great time!

We're heading down to South Staffordshire for the next fortnight to run the rest of our summer craft workshops. So there's plenty of planning to do!

Crafts in Coventry

Here are a few photos from the first of two craft workshops we're running this summer at Southfields Primary School in Coventry (where we made our glorious tiger mosaic, and filmed our first video diary). Today we worked with some local KS1 children who each made their very own magical story book starring their very own wizard or witch!

They made and bound their books, then designed houses, potions, spells, and monsters to fill it.

At the end they added words to their pictures to complete the story.

Seven Summer Hats for a School in Slough

So much for a relaxing end of term! We spent the last week before the summer holidays at Marish Primary School in Slough, making headdresses with (almost) all of its 640 children.

Each year group needed something different to wear for the procession at their annual Dance Festival (called Let's Dance), so we put our heads together and came up with 7 designs for 7 workshops: Reception made some colourful Rainbows; Y1 a night sky with a big yellow Moon; Y2 made feathers for their Air themed hats; Y3 did some brilliant, tall Fire headdresses; Y4 made long, sharp blades of grass to represent Earth; Y5 echoed their Water theme with wispy strips of shiny film; and Y6 made some impressive firey Suns.

Getting through all of the classes in just 5 days was certainly a challenge! But we got it done, and the results of the project are brilliant. We've been promised some photos from the event, so I'll pop those up as soon as they arrive.

Many thanks to Lucy for helping us out on the Monday when I couldn't be there. You did us proud! Does that mean that you're officially the Third Big Art Person though? We'll have to wait and see...

The Big Cat People

The Big Art People have been at those pebbles again! This time we spent 6 glorious days at St. James' Junior School in the centre of Derby, working with ALL year groups to produce these, frankly wonderful looking, big cats:

The designs are based on the school's 4 houses: Panther, Tiger, Lion, and Ocelot. Tim sketched them back in the office:

At the school the pebbles were sorted into colours, and the the four big cats were laid out in sandboxes. They were then painstakingly transferred, pebble by pebble, onto the wall by us and the children:

It was a tricky project to get right, but everyone worked really hard and I think you'll agree that the results are fantastic!

Thanks to all of the children at staff at the school; and special thanks to Andrew Buckenham for his help and support.

Jim (Big Artist)

Our First Video

You may have seen the Southfields Pebble Tiger skulking around our website in various places, well here is a video diary we made in the process edited down from hundreds of hours of footage into 5 minutes of pure viewing pleasure by Jim, just for you.

Hope you enjoy it!

Pick up the pieces

The other week we went to Holmes Chapel Primary School in Cheshire to help with their art week this year. It was an exciting week filled with paint, mosaics, mod-roc and superlambananas as different artists worked with different year groups over the course of the week on a variety of different projects. We worked with KS1 to produce a giant collaborative mural made up of 165 tiles, featuring their local viaduct over the river Dane.

We started with a photo of the viaduct, which Tim, using a variety of computer wizardry, turned into this watercolour style design:

This was then chopped up into 112 tile-sized pieces.

After covering their tiles with a special paper coating, the children were each given a slice of the painting to try to repaint with painstaking precision onto their tile.

It was a real challenge to mix the right colours and try to copy the abstract shapes that would eventually make up the final image, but with us on hand to help out they got the hang of it!

The reception children were given the task of painting a border for the picture. We chose oak leaves as they feature on the school's logo and the school colours, yellow and blue.

By day 3 the painting was really starting to come together:

Then on day four....

151 children, 165 tiles, 1 massive picture!