Artetc – Exploring Architecture with Art

I admit is, the current Lego phenomena here (over a month of solid play and counting) led me to suggest to Zoe that building a series of Artetc days around houses and street scenes would be interesting. I’ve got various non-art related ideas for this too and I do find that a tied together set of experiences works really well, as long as the kids actually engage at all of course.

So far, so good though 🙂 Zoe and I had a planning session and brainstormed a set of ideas that would just get the kids working on some themes and ideas and using some of the skills we’ve started to build up with various materials. The 6 girls between them have an interesting skill set – from very arty ones who slightly struggle to let go and relax about their results, to highly slap dash ones who can’t always see where to go or what a difference a bit of attention to detail makes. It is fair to say I own both of those and 4 of the 4 perfectionists! Add the natural gradient of skills that come with an age range in and we get some fascinating results, often very surprising as sometimes it isn’t the child we expect that produces the eye-catcher. I love the diversity that brings alongside all of them genuinely learning from each other.

We have a fairly default set of resources now which are Complete Book of Art Ideas (Usborne Art Ideas) and Art Skills (Art Ideas) (Usborne Art Ideas) plus Art Projects for Kids, a fairly brilliant website which utilises the two books a fair bit but also ties them in with masses of her own ideas. Then we add some of our own and it works, often, very well.

First of all we got the kids to use the cityscape idea so they’d spent some time thinking in detail about the elements of a house. This exercise doesn’t worry about perspective much, which makes it less stressful.

The results were fabulous.

All very unique and interesting and showing the different interest levels and styles rather well 🙂

Next came night time city skylines using wax resist, a simplified building outline and the concept of reflections.

Again, the results were simple but stunning.

Poppy and Josie both chose to redo their ones and it was interesting seeing them make changes.

Lastly we moved on to a collage effect, using sepia tones and drawn lines with splashes of extra colour. Collages tend to tip up the perfectionists, who want to cut neat lines instead of ripping. They are getting better at letting go a bit though, even Maddy 🙂

I had forgotten the book for this one, so we could only give them a brief idea from a small image on the web. This meant their interpretation of the craft was quite different to what it might have been – I love these. They make me think of hot, dusty holiday afternoons in unfamiliar towns.

It was a hugely successful day. Loved it 🙂