Shading

This was a project to get the year 6 children to think more about shading and tone in pencil drawing. I supplied a few of my black and white photographs and these were photocopied a number of times. The children copied the pictures and produced some really strong work.

Pinhole Photography

Here are a number of images from a workshop I did with Holmfirth Junior and Infant School.
I gave a number of one hour workshops on pinhole photography, showing them examples and explaining how cameras work.

The pinhole cameras that they made were constructed from; coffee tins, pringle tubes/whisky bottle tubes, shoeboxes, biscuit tins and small plastic film containers. The image sizes varied from 4x4cm to 20x25cm. 

Due to limited time (one hour), in the classroom and the large number of students, it took three separate lessons to make the cameras and to ensure that there were no light leaks. Because there was no darkroom and a shortage of time, I had to take them all home in three binliners and load them with light sensitive paper paper in my spare time.

I produced the loaded cameras the following week and the children were led outside to, (in theory) be guided by me towards the best positions and viewpoints.

In actuality, what happened was that they scattered in all directions and I found that as I was the only one with a light meter and a second hand on my watch, I was confined to helping only one at a time. Towards the end of the lesson, having helped about half the class, I hunted around for the rest of the children and found that some had been patiently waiting for me, whilst others had just given it a go. Of those, a few had given the two minutes I had suggested, some had not listened and given less than a second, or done more than one exposure on the camera. One lad even hand-held his camera for nearly ten minutes! 
After the session I processed the images and brought the prints in for them to see. The children were wildly enthusiastic about making images with simple materials and from something that they themselves had constructed.

Katie Morag

We recently worked with a group of year 2 children (aged 6 and 7) on an art project inspired by the Katie Morag children's books.
They looked at the stories and how the illustrations were created. They were then encouraged to draw a scottish landscape using water soluble pencils, experiment with wax resist for areas of sky and sea, and finally to paint the images.
As you can see from the examples here, they did a very good job.

Sarcophagus

Over the last ten years we have been involved with a number of school art projects. Recently, we were involved in a project to make an egyptian sarcophagus for a year four group and I documented the progress of the piece. When I showed the images to a friend who works in education he was knocked out and said we should do more. With that in mind, I have set up this blog to show some of the things we have done.

The finished sarcophagus. here are the stages leading up to it;