Drawing - Shape

Mug - By R

The children and I are working through drawing lessons by the Virtual Instructor. Today's lesson was about breaking down objects into their component shapes in order to draw them.

Mug - By L

Rs hand

L's hand

Great Valley Rally

Today we tried out the Great Valley Rally, a sort of treasure hunt around Perth's Swan Valley wine region. The children had to decipher direction clues and locate markers around the valley. The trail takes you to several historic sites and past many wineries and the chocolate factories.

First up was the old gaol and museum at the visitors centre.

Convict curfew bell

A family with 13 children all lived in this tiny house.

We passed several historic buildings including WA's oldest church.

Bells Rapid's were looking very un-rapid like due to the hot weather and we saw signs of a recent bush fire in the area.

That's a little geography and history covered this week then!

Georgian Ruins

At the weekend we took a short bush walk to visit the Georgian ruins in Yellagonga Regional Park.

There is also a short boardwalk through the swamp and paperbark trees.

Solar House

L has been building this cute solar powered house from a kit available at K-Mart. It has a working windmill, light and door alarm.

Magnetic Train

The children got a 3 month subscription to STEMbox  for New Year. The theme this month was magnets. One of the experiments was to make a train using magnets, a battery, and copper wire. Here it is in action.

Drawing Bikes

By R

I wanted to prove to the children that observation is very important when drawing. They wanted to draw some bike for a competition entry so first I asked them to draw a bike from memory.

By R

By L

Next we did a blind contour drawing looking only at the bike not the paper. This focuses the brain on observing.

By R

By L

Then we got down to a serious observational drawing. I think you can see that drawing from observation makes a much more accurate picture than drawing from memory.

By L

By R

Drawing - Line

By L

We are trying out drawing classes from The Virtual Instructor. Our first session was on line. We tried out blind contour drawing where you are not to look at your paper, only the object and your pencil must never come off the paper. We found it really focused our attention into looking at the object and then when we drew again looking at the paper we got much better results.

By R

We tried a little shading too.

By R

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! This year instead of travelling across the Nullarbor we spent new year at home eating loads, swimming in the pool and opening presents.