Continuing with our Arts Week we researched the Artist Damien Hirst. The children found out lots of interesting facts about Damien Hirst including the fact that he is considered the UK’s richest artist with an estimated net worth of around two hundred and fifteen million pounds! The children created some detailed and creative Artist Profiles which I still need to photograph so will add some examples of to this post next week!

We studied in particular Damien Hirst’s spin paintings which he creates in his studio by standing at the top of a ladder and pouting paint down onto a spinning canvas.

Taking inspiration from these paintings we planned our own spin art, choosing three colours which we felt worked well together and a coloured glitter to compliment our colour choices. The children thought about how the different colour combinations made them feel and made their final colour choices based on who they were creating their art work for.

Next came the fun part – creating our spin art. Using a rotating cake decorating stand placed in a cardboard box to catch the paint splatters we blue tacked our canvas onto the cake stand. We poured our three colours of paint in layers into a plastic cup and then poured the paint onto the centre of the canvas as we used our other hand to spin the canvas on the cake stand. Some children chose to pour their paint from a height whilst Miss Salter span the cake stand for them which created a different effect. We experimented with spinning the canvas at different speeds and pouring the paint in different places on the canvas. Finally we added glitter to our painting for a sparkly final touch. We felt that our finished paintings looked like portals like the portal that leads to Alchemy Island!

Each and every piece of our artwork was unique and beautiful! The children should be extremely proud of their creativity and colour choices!

These pieces of artwork will be available to buy in the New Year, more details to follow!

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I have been so incredibly impressed with Hawkstone’s creativity over Arts Week and can not wait to share with you what we have been working on.

We got Arts Week off to a flying start with a Christmas DT project which was linked to our materials work in Science. We melted and re-set chocolate in Christmas moulds and investigated which type of chocolate (dark, milk or white) melted quickest. We had great fun melting and pouring the chocolate into moulds! Some children got very messy!

We then designed and created some chocolate packaging for our product, thinking carefully about which colours worked best for Christmas packaging and designing a Christmas themed logo. We drew our own nets of cubes onto card to create our packaging and finally created collograph printing templates using string, pom-poms and pipe cleaners. We used rollers to roll paint onto our printing frame to print a repeated pattern of our Christmas logo onto our packaging. It was really tricky getting some of the art materials to stick to our card template and to not smudge our prints but all of the children showed great perseverance and skill when printing and created some really effective packaging!

After sticking our nets together to create a box and adding a Christmas bow to the lid of our packaging we then took inspiration from our Alchemy Island topic and sprayed edible gold paint onto our chocolates (turning chocolate into gold rather than metal into gold!)

The finished products looked incredible and were available to purchase at The School Christmas Fayre! I hope you all enjoy eating the chocolates this weekend as much as we enjoyed creating the product and packaging in school!