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!
