Where my wellies take me...

 It seems ages ago that Mrs Alderson asked if I would go into Beckermet School for their Arts Week and do some art work with the children. 

The brief was to do art work based on the local area.

I had a great idea for a project for a village school using the beautiful poetry book by Michael and Clare Morpurgo. 

I suggested that rather than have me in school all week I would ask artists, Rachel Metcalfe and Nanette Madan to do some work as well. The school would then have the opportunity of working with three different artists. 

The class teachers each selected poems from the poetry book and created art work and poems inspired by the book. 

Rachel worked with Y3/4 creating abstract landscapes of the local fells with watercolour.

She showed them how to mix colours and use clingfilm to create textures. 

 Nanette worked with all the children using tetra pak printing of the flora and fauna of the village.

Foiled packaging is used as a plate, drawn on, inked up, wiped over and then used to create an image.

I concentrated on drawing buildings using pen and pencil. Giving tips on where to start, how to build up simple shapes and use proportion to recreate the architecture of houses. Y5/6 drew a Georgian House, Y3/4 drew a cottage.

I also prepared a map of the village for the school to use in a number of exercises. One of those was to create a Beckermet Boogie Woogie inspired by Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie and his composition series.

With Y1/2 I created collaged colour sheets which were used by some Y5/6 girls to create a picture of Sellafield where many of the parents work.

It was great to see so many parents coming to see the work, so beautifully presented by the staff.