Melbourne Museum

Today we departed from "Camp Freezing" and headed into the city for the Melbourne Museum. Here we saw thousands of specimens and artefacts relating to Australia's natural history, indigenous and colonial culture.

These unusual Aboriginal objects are toy breasts to wear and a toy baby to breast feed. 

Pioneer Village

Today we joined some other home-educators for a trip to the Australiana Pioneer Village. We watched sheep shearing using the old fashioned shears, explored the buildings with our guides and experienced an 1800s school room and church.

Sketches To Sculptures

This week we turned our still life sketches into sculptures. First we isolated interesting sections from the drawing and then interpreted them into 3D. Circles became cylinders or pipes, lines became 3D walls. Squares became cubes.

Sculpture inspired by a spaghetti spoon by R

Sculpture inspired by a doll by L

Sculpture inspired by beads in a jar by mum

Vikings!

This weekend we have been studying Vikings. At home we researched Vikings using lots of books, websites and films. Watch this film for a good overview and visit this website for lots more information and games. The children made Viking long-ship models and baked some Viking bread.

Viking bread

Today we went to the National Maritime Museum where the Vikings exhibition is currently showing. Here we saw lots of real Viking treasure and boarded a replica long-ship.

Viking board game

The International Fleet Review is also currently under-way in Sydney. Lots of tall ships and warships from around the globe have congregated in the harbour. We were able to board several of the old sail ships at the museum wharf.

Patterns

By R

Today we have been using Photoshop to make repeat patterns based on our observational drawings. The pattern above came from this observational drawing (top right):

First we isolated small parts of our drawings and scanned them into the computer. We opened up a new square shaped document  in Photoshop (we used 400 by 400 pixels) and placed the drawing onto this. We drew over them in black using the pencil tool making sure that the design didn't touch the edge of the paper .We then deleted the layer containing the scan which left us with a crisp black outline drawing.

Next we used the Filter>Offset command to push the image off the edge of the paper. We experimented with the amount of offset, about half the size of the paper works well (so +200 pixels in our case). Make sure "Wrap Around" is checked and the pieces pushed off the edge will appear on the opposite side. We then added more design to the blank area in the centre. Once happy with the design we saved it as a pattern using Edit>Define Pattern. Next we added colours with the paint bucket tool and then saved the coloured version in the same way: Edit>Define Pattern. The patterns are now saved in Photoshop to be used any time.

To fill a page with the pattern we opened a new document, A4 size, the same as our printer paper. We selected the paint bucket tool, on the top tool bar chose pattern in the drop down menu (the default that you will see is foreground). Then we chose either the black and white or colour version of our patterns from the box along side. We clicked on the page to fill it with our chosen pattern.

By R

By R

By L

By L

By L

By Mum

You can use the patterns to fill in any shape you like

As you can see we have lots more things to try out with this process.