Welcome to Ms. Willis' Art and French Blog

This week our Gr. 2/3 artists began an exploration of emotions. The prompt was to use lines, shapes and colours to represent happiness, calm, worry, anger, fear, and sadness. There was no right/wrong answer; no finished product. What came out of it were many beautiful discussions of how and when these emotions arise, what they feel like in our bodies, and how one emotion might lead to or even mask another.  Adding a new material – water colour pencils – made this extra fun!

Nature was a common theme for “calm”, purple often represented “worry”, and we even discussed how sadness is presented as anger sometimes. Some students purposely smudged their colours to enhance their representation of the emotion. The most impactful discussion for me was when a student said “I did lots of scribbles for both worry and anger. But the worried scribbles are more controlled and the angry scribbles are out of control!”

Our next step will be to look at how other artists represent emotions in their work, then we will create an art piece of our own!

Tim Burton is an artist of many talents. He was born in California, and was interested in drawing and filmmaking from a young age. His character illustrations, set designs, and the mood of his films have a very distinct style. When you see a Tim Burton movie, you definitely know it’s his! Gr. 4/5 art students examined his style, and created their own character portraits with similar features and a muted palette of white, grey and black.  Through their artwork, can you determine the characteristics of the Tim Burton style?

The Gr. 4/5 Art classes have just completed a study of the artist Sonia Delaunay. She was a French artist, born in Ukraine, who was married to another well known artist named Robert Delaunay. She had a very modern and unique style that often used lines and circles. Her style came to be known as Orphism. Sonia studied colours, and liked to use complementary colours to make her work bold and bright. Complementary colours are colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel. She also applied her style and colour theory to textiles, fashion, and design. She even painted a car!

Here are a few examples of our students’ work inspired by Sonia Delaunay:

Brentwood Park students honoured the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation with a meaningful assembly. Each class created a tile that represented the learning and deep conversations around this difficult part of Canada’s history. Here are a few of the tiles we created in our art classes.

Divisions 12 and 16 talked about how students should feel when they come to school. (A right and a privilege that Residential School attendees did not have). We wove our ideas together.

Division 11 talked about empathy, and used hearts to show connections to each other.

International Dot Day celebrates the well-known Peter H. Reynolds book “The Dot”, where a frustrated artist learns to make her mark using… you guessed it… dots! Through this book we learn that being an artist is more than just drawing. You just have to start by making your mark, and have an open mind to where your creativity can lead. Like Vashti, we started our art classes this year by investigating the places a simple dot could take us.

Brentwood Park’s first week theme was “We Are Together”. We explored different ways that we are together at school every day – playing, learning, exploring, listening, eating… and creating! For the classes that came to the art room, we used watercolour drip art and Zentangle doodles to create a large collaborative art piece. If you’d like to see it in person, please visit Room 18! 
Continue reading “We create together!”