It has been a busy week in the art department with renovations and new floors being laid in our rooms, taster lessons, year 6 transition lessons, competitions and artist workshops coming up next week, but this hasn’t stopped our fantastic team from running some fun and engaging lessons for our new sixth form students. Year 11 students have had the chance to try out large scale monoprints in art lessons with Mrs Speker and Mrs Waring, learning to etch and use a printing press and draw portraits on large scale sheets of paper using charcoal and pastel.

In graphics Mrs Hoskins and Miss Cole ran a series of taster lessons looking at how graphic artists design, draw and create children’s book illustrations. Students looked at the books of Charlie and Lola and recreated these characters and also at Eric Carle’s children’s book about a sloth and designed their own sloth children’s character using pencil, pen, ink and collage. In photography lessons students learnt about what makes a good photograph and learnt some basic composition and framing techniques competing for the best photograph in a small competition we ran. Students also took some photographs using fast shutter speeds of balloons filled with water popping which they thoroughly enjoyed! They then learnt some basic photoshop skills in our Mac suite and enjoyed editing their best pictures.

Students said that ‘a few tasters widened my knowledge of photography’ Leo (year 11), while Tommy said ‘It has made me look forward to doing graphics even more than I was already looking forward to’ and Ruby said it allowed her to ‘explore different styles that she wouldn’t normally try’. While Caleb said that he created ‘the best character I’ve ever done!’ -Mr Flappy.

We wish our year 11s a fantastic summer and we are looking forward to starting the A-level courses with them in September. It has been a pleasure to see them making the most of this opportunity, fully engaging and trying their best in every lesson.