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!