Year 4

Term 1

Year 4 have been learning about Diwali in our RE lessons. In art we looked at some Rangoli patterns and worked in teams to create giant Rangoli patterns on the playground.

We then combined our knowledge of Rangoli patterns with our research into the artist Veronika Richterova who creates her work out of plastic bottles. She uses heat to twist, turn and cut up the plastic bottles and to give them natural forms. We decorated plastic bottles with our own Rangoli patterns and then cut some of them up to make spiral shapes and used some to look like Diwali lanterns.

We then put all of our artwork together to make this huge installation which is on display in our art studio!

Term 2

Year 4 have been looking at paintings depicting Native American Indians. They discussed the types of traditional clothing they wear and created pages in their sketchbooks all about them. They then looked at the painting Blue eyed chief by Jim Denomie and talked about how this art looks different to the work that they looked at the previous week.

The children then designed their own portraits of a Native American chief. These were then created using oil pastels. We discussed how to use complementary colours to make the person stand out against the background and we also looked at blending the oil pastels in the background. We were very pleased with our final portraits.

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 looked at the work of batik artist, Marina Elphik. We looked at some photos of teeth and x-rays (as this linked to our topic work) and drew some sketches in our sketchbooks to give us some ideas of how we could create our work. We then had an art lesson with special effects artist, Jeannie Ford who showed us some of her silicone dolls and taught us how to make models of teeth, using various tools and clay.

Once we had lots of ideas in our sketchbooks we decided on what we wanted our final piece of batik to look like. We sketched our drawing onto fabric and then carefully squirted glue over the bits that we wanted to remain white. After it had dried we painted the fabric using acrylic paints. When we washed the glue off our pictures were revealed! Finally we embellished our work by sewing some sequins onto it and adding some stitches.

Term 6

This term Year 4 have been studying the work of paper artist, Parth Kothekar. We all had a go at making a feather like his out of paper and discussed how tricky it was to make all the little cuts to create a realistic looking feather.

We then had to plan and create an underwater scene. We used different shades of blue card to build up the layers for the rocks, ensuring that the darkest one went at the back to make it look even more 3D. Finally we looked at silhouettes of fish and coral to help us to draw the sea creatures to put in the background. We then photographed our work and did some quick evaluations.