Year 3

Term 1

Year 3 read the first story in Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories. They talked about ‘Lion Man’, an ancient carved sculpture believed to be around 40,000 years old and discussed how he was made, what he was made out of, why he was made and what it was used for. The children used charcoal, pastel and drawing pencils to draw some sketches of him.

The following week they had to look carefully at their sketches and create some clay sculptures of him. They agreed that if he had been made out of clay then he would not have lasted all those years. They then looked at different types of paints and had a go at mixing brown using primary colours. Once they had established how to mix brown they added white to create tints and black to create shades.

Finally, they had to create their own artwork pretending to be real cave men (and ladies!). They learnt how artists in the Stone Age would have used the shapes of the cave walls to plan where the animal would need to be painted. The children used the playground, classroom walls and under the desks to lean on them give them a real Stone Age experience!

Term 4

This term we started off our topic at home. We watched a Youtube video which showed different ways of joining card together and we had a go at trying out these ways. The following week we learnt how to make trees using card. We had to make some trees and save them to use with our mini worlds. We also learnt how to make a background by just using ripped up cardboard.

Once we were back at school we looked at warm and cool colours. We looked at a photo of a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai and talked about his use of colour and why he used a contrasting colour for the sky. We then created our own pictures using a mixture of warm and cool colours.

We looked at some photos of rooms which have been decorated in different colours and we talked about how they made us feel. Some of them were bright and colourful and made us feel energised and alert and some were cool and relaxing.

Finally, we put all of our work together to make our mini world which was in a cardboard box. We added characters to our work and used torches with coloured cellophane to light up our work in different colours. Finally we photographed our mini worlds, thinking about the emotions that we would like to portray. We talked about which lighting we liked best and why.

Term 5

This term we have been finding out about the artist Sara Drake who creates 3D maps of countries and places. We decided that we would create our own artwork depicting the South East. First of all we drew the map on a huge canvas and we then used modelling paste to build up the land and add some texture to the sea. We then painted it using acrylic paints. Then each one of us were given a list of buildings or features that we had to create out of clay. These included Leeds Castle, Reculver Towers, skyscrapers in London, Big Ben, beach huts and the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. We also had to create lots of farm animals and trees. Finally, we painted our models and then we had to position them carefully on the map. We invited the other classes into the hall to view our work.

Term 6

This term we have been looking at a watercolour painting by Anne Camozzi. We studied the painting and discussed the skills that we would need to be able to create our own versions of this work. We agreed that we would need to think of lots of different patterns and think about the use of lines. We made grids in our books and drew a selection of patterns and also shared our work in a mini gallery so that we could magpie each other’s ideas. We talked about making some of our lines thicker than others to add interest and looked at creating spirals, waves, zigzags and various patterns. After that we drew out our work and discussed the use of complementary colours in our work. We painted the boxes really carefully, using size 2 - 4 paintbrushes and added on the patterns once they had dried. We were very proud of our artwork.