Adventures In Art: Challenge 19 - To Infinity And Beyond!

Welcome to the penultimate MG Art Club challenge - To Infinity And Beyond!
But before we leave Earth, please click here to check out last week's Globetrotting Exhibition if you haven't already:

https://artatmg.blogspot.com/2020/07/globetrotting-exhibition.html

Right, now we're ready for lift off, it's time to get out of this world and into Infinity And Beyond! Yes, this week's art challenge is all about SPACE ART!

This week's focus artist is Peter Thorpe.

Peter Thorpe is a life long space fan, who started painting rockets and outer space as a way of finishing off tins of paint.

He uses leftover paint to create an abstract (made up, not real) background on a board or canvas. At first he wasn't sure what to do with these backgrounds, but then he started to paint planets and rockets on top and they really 'took off'!!

Here are some more examples of Peter Thorpe inspired art by children of different ages.

Like Peter Thorpe, they've all got quite abstract backgrounds with planets and rockets placed on top.

If you aren't so interested in how to get to space, but just want to be surrounded by it, there are lots of different ways you could capture it.

Rose created her planet art by splattering a black piece of paper with white paint. She then used the shaving foam marbling technique to create her planets, which she cut out and stuck onto her background.

Here's a good introductory video to the shaving foam marbling technique - you could adapt to get the colours and effects of the planets you want to do:

Watercolours work well along with felt pens that you then brush over with a little water.

Oil pastels or wax crayons are good for colouring your planets and stars, before going over your picture with a dark paint wash. The wax crayons and oil pastels will 'resist' the paint and won't let it soak in like it will do on the rest of the paper.

If you have some black paper/card just splattering it with white paint immediately gives you a perfect space background, before working on your planets. If you are very careful you can draw and colour your planets first before splattering. The picture below was done in colouring pencil, with added details, and some outlining with a fine black pen.

These planets were created using a mix of paint and oil pastels - again a black background really make things stand out.

Right in the middle you may choose to do an astronaut....maybe even yourself in space!

A few years ago Year 4 at MG were doing a topic on space, where we looked at the artist Peter Thorpe as well as creating our own alien space monsters. We used soft pastels for our rocket pictures and oil pastels for our monsters so we could see the different effects you could get from both.

Click here to find some more examples of what we got up to:

https://artatmg.blogspot.com/2016/11/past-adventures-6.html

Before we started to think about and create our space monsters, we played this roll and draw game to get us warmed up.

Then we set about creating our own monsters, often incorporating some ideas from the game above, along with other examples that we saw as well as using our imagination.