Parkhill Junior: Artist in Residence 12th

During this week, Parkhill Junior School have been lucky enough to have an Artist in Residence working with Year 6. Each class had a day working with the artist, Miriam Smith-Phillipson, who was trained as a fine artist at Hornsey School of Art in late 1960s where she took her degree. She works in a number of different styles. She likes to work expressively and often combines abstract qualities with figurative form. She regards herself as an artist and educator.

The Year 6 children have been given the opportunity to work with acrylic paint on hardboard. They have been able to manipulate and play with the paint in different ways, improved on controlling their brushwork and they have experimented with mark making.

The remaining days Miriam has been working in the entrance hall on her own painting. Adults and children alike have been fascinated with watching the progress of this piece of art and all classes have been involved in questioning the artist about her work and approaches to it.

Miriam Smith-Phillipson - Community Arts Co-ordinator for Beal High School
“It’s been an amazing week. Everybody was successful and worked really hard”.

ICT Sessions. Using the computer to create a copy of their picture.

Using Revelation Natural Art software the children have started to use the computer mouse to draw their artwork and produce a copy of their picture.

This software offers a variety of drawing media which enabled the children to work with an on screen acrylic paintbrush and mix their own colours, therefore copying the method they used to create the colour pallet for their original pictures.

Click here to find out more about Revelation Natural Art.

Time was taken at the start of the first ICT session to try to manipulate the mouse to achieve the effect of the brush strokes that were so prominent on their artwork.

This was not easy. The initial reaction from some of the children was to draw an outline and fill with colour or just to move the mouse quickly backwards and forwards to place the colour on the screen. This obviously did not create any intensity in the picture. The best impression was achieved by using the mouse in much the same way as the paintbrush, using small movements to build up an area of colour. The children then used the mouse to over-lap this colour with various tints of the original shade to create depth.

The level of concentration was extremely high! Some children were more successful than others but everyone managed to save a document that they could continue to work on.

Update: 8th February 2009

Run the movie below to see the original artwork and the computer generated pictures.