Art Week in Reception

Reception have been busy developing their creative skills during Art Week! Our whole school theme for Art Week this year is ‘Celebrating Britain.’ The theme was inspired by the recent historic event of His Majesty the King’s Coronation. In Reception, we have been exploring this theme and expressing our ideas through different art medium!

To begin our learning during Art Week, we studied the artist Piet Mondrian who is our focus artist for this term. We learnt that Piet Mondrian is best known for his abstract paintings. We found out that art that is abstract does not show things that are recognisable such as people, objects or landscapes. Instead artists use colour, shape and texture. We looked at his painting ‘Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red,’ and shared our ideas about what we could see including lines, squares, rectangles and colour.

After exploring Piet’s artwork we had a go at creating our own artwork in the style of the artist. We drew horizontal and vertical black lines which created squares and rectangles and then used paint to add colour. We focused on using blue, white and red paint to represent the colours of the United Kingdom flag.

Over the week, we also participated in a special art workshop led by an artist from the October Gallery in Holborn. To build on our Art Week theme of ‘Celebrating Britain,’ we focused on exploring ‘transport’ in Great Britain and discussed the different modes we have. Kirsty talked to us about the history of the canal system in Great Britain and we looked at different canal boats. We experimented with using a simple paper technique to make a boat. We decorated them by adding windows, doors and other features. After we made our boat, we created simple backgrounds using oil pastels. We had a go at drawing some things we might pass as we travel on our canal boats.

Following on from our art workshop, we explored modes of transport further. We looked at photographs of different types of transport we see in London and talked about the variety of shapes and colours they have. Using mosaic paper squares, we made our own mode of transport art, thinking carefully about creating the different shapes using colour effectively. We can’t wait to put them altogether to create a class art piece!

A special thanks to the October Gallery for supporting us with our art in class!