Recycling art

In 2008 I worked with a group of 5-6 year olds where we started on a piece of HUGE artwork of the sea based on the children's interest (no doubt influenced by their summer holidays)

The background was created by using a white glue wash with different shades of ripped blue, green and white tissue paper overlapping each other. Then the children painted waves across this and splashed on bubbles and then finished off with glitter.

Over the weeks the children filled the sea with images of fish that they created themselves and stuck on. The artwork filled an entire wall.

a sea filled with fish and sea weed

The next project was France, as we had a child that moved from there and we were all curious to learn more... as part of that project we decided to take down our sea and replace it with a Monet inspired artwork. It just felt a shame to take it all down... so we looked at Monet's artwork and we decided together that we could keep up the background and that it would be the water part of our Monet inspired painting...

The children worked out how to make a bridge for the painting (with lots of dots on it as Monet's style seemed to be full of dots and splodges). We also made waterlilies and Irises to complete our Monet inspired creation. I mixed flour and art medium into the paint to make it very thick and structured an we studied how the flowers only looked like flowers from a distance and not close up. It was wonderful watching the children move back and forth across the room to be able to see their flower "grow" from a distance. I noticed that painting flowers this way was easier for the boys than the girls ( I brought in real Iris for them to paint) and I wondered if this was because it was seldom they drew or painted flowers while the girls did it often, you know the kind with a circle in the middle and five round petals going round it...

The children got the taste for exploring new countries so we moved on to a variety of countries each with a connection to the children in the group in one way or another... when we "travelled" to Africa we decided to once again re-use the blue background

This time it was animals that really caught their imagination (this is a close up) we created a baobab tree, with a leopard and parrots in it and a life size 3D giraffe baby using old scraps of paper glued onto the giraffe form and then we glued tissue paper over it to create the 3D effect... the children then painted the giraffe patterns - if I remember correctly there started off with 4 children and ended up with 12 working on the giraffe... and just like the sea artwork the children could add to this African animal scene as they pleased

Sorry the photo quality is not the same as usual - but they are photos of photos...