An Apple A Day.....

Year 3's new topic is You Are What You Eat, so in their Art lessons we are looking at still life pictures and linking this to the different styles and techniques of The Impressionists and Post Impressionists, in preparation for our forthcoming visit to The National Gallery.

We started by investigating what still life pictures are by looking at some of the work of Paul Cezanne.

We noticed that Cezanne seemed to like apples, so we made this our focus and like all good artists, practised sketching an apple, developing our shading techniques using cross-hatching, in our sketchbooks first.

We then created our own 'modern' apple still life pictures, using oil pastels. We tried to blend our colours carefully to capture the different colours of apples, as well as thinking about which colours stood out next to each other. Some of us drew our apples free hand, some of us created a template,(as we wanted all our apples to be uniform), which we experimented with, laying the apples in different positions. We remembered to put in our horizon 'excuse me!' line, so it was clear which part of our picture was the wall and which the table cloth - we coloured both of these in with different patterns.

This week we looked at another artist - Renoir and particularly how he used colour in his paintings to make them look brighter.

He was a big fan of complementary colours (particularly orange & blue) and he often used them side by side to make his pictures look 'brighter'. So we revised our complementary colours.....

.....before creating a very un-Impressionistic picture! We each chose a different fruit with a distinctive complementary colour, drew and painted it, ensuring the background was its complementary colour partner. We discovered placing the two side by side certainly did make each look brighter - sadly the colours in these photos don't reflect it as well as the originals! We ended up with a mini Pop Art display!!

Now a little challenge for you: 
Look at the pictures below. Which one shows a complementary colour pair? 
If you're stuck ask Swan or Swallow class!