Ancient Roman Style Paper Mosaics

Inspiration: Black and white ship mosaics from Ancient Rome.

These grade 7s were studying the ancient world as well as learning Italian so it seemed like a great opportunity to look at Roman mosaics.
After showing the students photographs showing different examples of boat mosaics they designed their own by cutting paper into small pieces and creating a mosaic on black card. Finishing touches were drawn on with liquid paper pens.
Limiting the colour scheme to black and white created a striking display of boats.

Castle Paintings

Grade 2 students created a drawing of their own imaginary castle after looking at books about castles and fairy tales featuring castles. They then painted their castles and used wooden skewers to draw textures into the paint whilst still it was wet. Once dry, they outlined their work in a black marker.

Big Bad Wolves

Inspiration: The children used their imagination to draw a Big Bad Wolf from a fairy tale.

After discussing the characteristics of wolves and how to make them look big and bad, I asked these grade 2 students to draw and then colour with oil pastels.

Op Art Drawings

  
Inspiration:The paintings of English Op Artist Bridget Riley (1931-).  Image: Bridget Riley, 'Blaze 4' 1963.
                               
Older students always seem to really enjoy Op Art. After looking at some of Bridget Riley's paintings, my grade 7s created their own Op Art inspired work by drawing overlapping circles onto their page with a compass and then drawing a grid of either straight, diagonal or curved lines over the top of their circles. They then chose two contrasting colours and coloured their design in a checkered pattern.

 

Potted Sunflowers

Grade 1 students made these potted sunflowers to celebrate the beginning of Spring. Plant pots are paper cups painted brown, a kebab skewer was painted green for the stem and the sunflowers were coloured and cut out from a template I created. I poured a little plaster into each cup to it weigh down and to plant the flowers in. Students made leaves from scraps of green card and glued to the stem.


 

Ancient Egyptian Style Carved Tablets

Grade 7 students created these Ancient Egyptian inspired carved tablets from plaster.

After studying the designs used in artefacts and heiroglyphics, each student drew a design on paper. We made a plaster block by mixing up plaster in the bottom of an icecream container. Once set, the plaster was popped out of the container, the edges were sanded and the students drew their designs onto their block in pencil. Carving tools were used to carve out their design and finished blocks were painted to look aged.

Tiger Sculptures

Inspiration: Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger.

Grade 3 students made these tigers to celebrate Year of the Tiger.
They constructed a base using a cardboard tube body, a  section of egg carton for the head, pop stick legs and a pipe cleaner tail.
We then covered them in a layer of paper mache. After looking at a lot of photos of tigers, the children painted in orange and white and used black markers to draw on the faces and give their tigers some stripes.

I like the drawing this boy is doing whilst waiting for his tiger to dry...:)