Eco Fest Art

During Eco Fest week in art, we thought about how to make something beautiful out of scrap or discarded materials.

We talked about how art can be very expensive to make when you factor in materials, time and energy, but how, when you flip this and use humble, simple and cheap materials you can still get some wonderfully creative results. With this in mind, Upper School pupils have been busy making their own flowers using old newspaper, vintage buttons and wire.

They enjoyed the calming process of painting several watercolour circles directly onto torn out pages of the Blackmore Vale, and then cutting them out to form different sized discs. These were then layered together and fixed using an old button and small piece of florist wire. The final 'flourish' involved really scrunching up the flower to give it more depth and to help separate the 'petals'. Some were tentative with this as it did feel wrong, but it definitely gave the pieces the required finishing touch! We look forward to making a group display of these colourful pieces. 

Younger pupils spent time in their art lesson making bespoke 'eco beads' using shiny pages from old copies of the National Geographic magazine. We cut long, thin triangles from magazine pages and then rolled these around a paper straw and fixed with small amount of PVA glue to form a 'bead'. The colour variation achieved is really effective, and the best thing is that each bead is unique! They really got the hang of it after some practice and threaded their finished beads onto a necklace to take home.