Marbled Christmas Cards

So this week the children in the Art Club made Marbled Christmas Cards!

We had so much fun making marbled holly berries and making pop-up holly leaves. Some of the children were loving this project so much that they made three cards each!

Marbling is easy! Just drop the paint into a bucket of water and swirl the colours together with a stick. Then put your polystyrene shape into the paint slowly and pull out quickly.

When the 'berries' were dry they were stuck onto the card with super strong glue.

Then the children were given some ribbon to make a border. The holly leaves were cut out and arranged with the berries. Lots of different designs started to emerge. Pink leaves, blue leaves, floating berries, multiple berries on top of one another and lots of other colourful decorations!

Just 2 more weeks of Art Club left in 2011! Happy Christmas everyone!

Inside a Bee Colony Artwork

For the last 2 weeks the children have been busy making an artwork called 'Inside a Bee colony'!

For the first week they made a paper pulp mixture using newspaper, marble powder, water and pva glue. They looked at pictures of bees and made their raised, relief shapes from the paper pulp and glued them to a large sheet of ply.

When the bees had dried, the whole artwork was given a layer of white emulsion. The children made hexagonal templates and got to work drawing the honeycomb all over the board.

To fill the artwork with even more bees, the children each drew a 2D bee next to their 3D or 'relief' bee.

Then it was time to get painting! We decided on making lots of shades of oranges for the honeycomb and a mix of yellows, blacks and blues for the bees. The children worked brilliantly together, helping make sure every white space was filled by the end of the session.

I think you'll agree that the finished artwork is superb! Well done everybody!

Sparkly Acetate Animals

So this week the children got into making Sparkly Acetate Animals. They are filled with confetti so when you give them a shake, all the confetti moves around and sparkles in the light!

First of all they decided on their shape, drew it onto some A4 paper and cut the shapes out of 2 sheets of Acetate.

Then they got some strips of selotape and carefully secured the two shapes together, all round the edges, leaving a hole or approx 1 inch space.

Next they fed some confetti shapes into the hole and sealed it up.

Finally they added glass painted features on the top of their animal.

Love this project! Great process and beautiful results. Here are some of the finished ones - enjoy!