Preparing for the art exhibition!!

Hamilton East School is preparing for our very own art exhibition. Every class is working on art to display and in room 8 we have been making clay leaves to display. 

We started by describing Autumn and the changes we see in the colour of our surroundings.

We then looked at some pictures of leaves and thought about the colours and what we liked and didn't like about the art.

In groups we looked at each picture and wrote down what we liked, didn't like and what we thought was interesting about each picture.

MAKING THE LEAVES

To make the leaves we had to find some leaves that were a good shape and had veins that we could feel. We needed leaves like this so we could press them into the clay to make a good imprint.

We looked for our leaves in the garden behind the hall and found heaps of different ones.

We then sketched our leaves in our sketching books, we used the 'whispering, talking, shouting' pencil strokes that we learnt at the beginning of term.

We practiced sketching the veins and outline of the leaf with different shades of pencil.

Using the clay

Once we had found, studied and sketched our leaves we were ready to start making the clay leaves.

We started rolling the clay in our hands and making sure all the airbubbles were squashed out of it, this stops it cracking in the kiln.

Then we rolled the clay flat and to the right size for our leaf.

Next we pressed our leaf into the clay and rolled it with our rolling pin. Then slowly we pulled the leaf off and worked on the imprint. We used tools to make the veins deeper and we cut out the leaf.

We were really pleased with our leaves but when we thought about the shape, we realised leaves aren't always flat.

We made a second batch of leaves and this time tried curving up the edges of the leaves to see if we could make them a bit more realistic looking. 

Edie took them to Peachgrove road Intermediate school where they have a kiln. They had to stay in the kiln for a long time, a few days!

Painting the leaves

We thought about the colour of leaves and realised they are all different greens, browns and yellows.

To prepare for getting the right colour we tried making our own greens with pastels.

We started with the primary colours blue, red and yellow.

We then tried mixing each of the colours together to see what colours we could make. We experimented with more and less of each colour and made heaps of different shades of green.

In these photos we are pointing to the colour we liked the most that we made. We wonder if we will be able to make the same greens when we mix the paint for the leaves.

Some of us even named the new colours that we made...come and look at our sketching books to see the names we came up with!!