Art and design – collaging birds
As part of our Art lessons, Year One’s topic looked at birds and feathers. We began by looked at the work of illustrator Quentin Blake who illustrated pictures for Roald Dahl whom we were studying in our English lessons. We learnt that Quentin used a light box to help him trace over his pictures making it easier and quicker to edit his drawings. We looked at how a light box work by lighting up an image making it easier to trace. We then used tracing paper trace the outline of a peacock feather.
In our next lesson, we looked at the colours in a peacock feather and learnt that all colours come from mixing the three primary colours of red, blue and yellow. We then learnt if you mix the primary colours you get green, orange and purple, which are the secondary colours, and if we mix secondary colours we get tertiary colours. We then had a go mixing paints to create a colour wheel showing all the primary, secondary and tertiary colours. On our wheels we ticked the colours we could see in a peacock’s feather.
Using our knowledge from colour mixing, we mixed the colours to match our first-hand observations and used our own mixed colours to paint over a given outline of a peacock’s feather to create a realistic painting. Our feathers were then joined together to make a stunning peacock which was put on display in the Key Stage One corridor.
After hearing about Roald Dahl’s description of the Roly Poly bird we then had a go at re-creating our own truly stunning bird using collage as an art technique. We learnt that means to arrange and glue. We had a lot of fun drawing our own birds, cutting and sticking paper to create our background colours and then adding on a range of sequins, feathers, ribbons etc to add details to our birds.
