City Culture

There was a lot going on in Perth this weekend with several cultural festivals and exhibitions. First up was the KickstART art festival. The children got involved in making an outdoor sculpture whilst listening to various bands on the stage. There was also the opportunity to try out croquet.

As part of the festival the State Library of WA was showing the travelling sketchbook exhibition with art by young people across the state.

In the same area the Art Gallery of WA was showing Comic Tragics. The children, R in particular, enjoyed looking at the different comic art on display. We hope to draw some of our own this week.

Also showing at the gallery was year 12 Perspectives - some works by graduating year 12 students from WA.

We also took in the Buddha's Birthday celebrations at Langley Park. Of course everyone was most interested in tasting some delicious vegetarian Chinese foods.

Explorers Website

The children have been using Weebly to make websites. You can get an education account, add your students and build small sites for free. It doesn't cost much to upgrade and get more pages. Here are their first sites which are all about explorers. More pages will be added soon.

R's Website

L's Website

Portraits Shaun Tan Style

After our visit to the Shaun Tan exhibition (see previous post), we decided to make some portraits in the same style. First we needed a collage background like in the picture book "The Lost Thing". The children used torn pages of sheet music, novel and dictionary pages. They were stuck down with plenty of PVA and scraped with a credit card to remove any bubbles. We've scanned the collage sheets in to keep for another project.

Before we tried a Shaun Tan style portrait we practised drawing eyes, mouths, noses and faces using realistic proportions.

Next we looked at Shaun's pictures to determine what makes up his unique style. We noticed his faces are elongated and the features are narrower and placed lower on the face than in real life. The children made a second portrait using these proportions. We mounted the portraits on the collage background and added a close up on the eye and some decorative boxes like in the book.

By R

By L

Shaun Tan Exhibition

Our local library and art gallery are showing "Shaun Tan: The Art of Story. Discovering The Lost Thing - Book to Film". It's a great little exhibition with original artwork from the picture book and film. The exhibition shows the process used to turn the picture book into an animated short film.

The children designed their own "lost things" for the kids mural at the gallery.

Shaun Tan created lots of mixed media texture pieces which were used to "cover" characters and backgrounds in the film. 

The children are going to take some of Shaun's ideas and incorporate them into their own story books for their entry into the Make Your Own StoryBook competition. Watch this space!

Latest Creations

Here are the kids latest creations. Above are bread rolls by L. R made herb and cheese balls.

L has been on the sewing machine making a quilt for her soft toys.

We've been to a few workshops lately at Bunnings DIY store with our home education group. Last week the children made these hand-print mosaics.

By L

By R