Thursday 26th June

At Artclub today we continued with our “Andy Warhol” inspired prints.

There were backgrounds to print and then on to these we overprinted the blocks we had designed and collaged.

Here are some of the designs drying…

For those of us who had finished printing, there was time to do some still-life observational drawing on to paper to inspire our next design, or in contrast, we could draw directly on to the block to create some experimental marks.

These we will continue next week.

The Grand Depart in Leeds Topic with Year 5

I (Mrs.Chin), have just had the pleasure of working with the Year 5 children, Mr. Malley and Miss Kaye on an Art topic whilst the Year 6 pupils were at Residential. We were to create a design that combined a Leeds landmark and a bike which we would then print on to a T shirt.  This could then be worn when we went to see the Grand Depart in Leeds the first weekend in July.

First, we researched which Leeds landmark we wanted to use, for our printing.  The most popular were Bridgewater Place, The Civic Hall, Kirkstall Abbey and The Corn Exchange. We wrote down some facts about the buildings and shared them with the class.

Then we drew the building of our choice, paying special attention to the most prominent architectural features.

This drawing was then transferred on to card on to which we collaged different materials to create areas of texture and emphasise the most important parts like windows and doors.

Sometimes this could be quite detailed, like cut-out pieces of card or in contrast a whole area could just be covered in bubble wrap to create an impression of windows.

The next afternoon we inked up the templates and printed them on to paper.  This gave us an idea of what the finished print would look like and whether we liked the colours we had chosen and needed to add more detail to our templates.

There were some pre-made templates of competitors on racing bikes which I had made which we inked up, looking at where we would place them in relation to the buildings.

The next day, we printed on fabric samples before printing on to our actual T shirts.  This gave us one last final chance to alter our design, but also to practise the rolling process.

Then it was time to print on to our T shirts.  Here are some for you to see.

Some pupils were able to extend their designs further by printing a map as well as the landmark and bike.

This was achieved by using a block of Safeprint and scoring some lines into it to represent roads.

On to this background, another layer with different thicknesses of yarns, was overprinted.

The T shirts can be worn at the Grand Depart and it would be fabulous to have a photo of the children wearing them.  These, we can then put on our display in the school mall.

Thursday 19th June

At Artclub today we printed on to fabric.

First we looked at our prints from last week and selected our chosen background colours.

Instead of repeating the pattern twice, we needed to print the background four times and in the pattern of a square.  We set off to do this.

Sometimes it was difficult to judge how much ink to apply as cotton fabric takes the printing ink differently to paper. Sometimes the colour was faded, but by overprinting the background a second time we achieved a vibrant, even colour. This is all part of learning how much ink to apply to the block and how much pressure to apply when using the clean roller to press the ink through on to the fabric.

Next week some of us will be completing our background colours, whilst some of us will be ready to print our decorated blocks on top of the backgrounds.

Thursday 12th June

At Artclub today we used our blocks we had created last week to make our "Andy Warhol" inspired prints.

We started by choosing a background colour and printing this on to paper.

We then chose another colour to compliment the first colour.

Over this we would print our design.  The colours we could choose had to be dark so that we could see a contrast. Mrs. Mistry modelled how to ink up our blocks.

It was quite difficult to get the right amount of ink on to the blocks as they had textured areas on them, so if we had too much ink on we ran a print off first to absorb the excess.

It was then fine to overprint on to the background colour we had printed earlier. We needed to register our corners so that the top print sat in line over the bottom print.

The results were exciting and we cannot wait to print on to fabric next week.