Word Clouds - Apps

Had a bit of fun with these two great Word Cloud Apps this afternoon. Word Collage is a very easy 2 button app that lets you create Word Clouds in a very similar way to http://www.wordle.net which is a Word Cloud Web based program. Visual Poetry is my favourite of the two as you have a few more options and you are able to shape the text and manipulate the colour more than with Word Collage. 

Both great buys and heaps of fun. 

Sketching Faces

As part of our discovery unit we are discovering how to draw our faces uses correct positioning. We looked into a great video which showed us where our eyes, ears, nose and mouth need to be positioned on the face to look right.

These are some of the examples to show how we are getting on.

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Aboriginal Art

We are beginning to look at different artists and styles of artwork from around the world. This has been a lead on from our Olympic study. To motivate the students and to generate ideas we watched this short movie. It was very clear and concise and gave simple instructions on techniques etc.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIRSRzmfVnw

This website has some fantastic examples of Aboriginal art as well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andybear/with/3951741307/#photo_3951741307

These are the initial drafts that the students did to practice technique, using paint and just for discovering. Our focus was to use the correct technique and earthy colors.

Dean and his sun pattern.

Maya and her funky lines and smiling sun.

Day 1 of students own Aboriginal art idea. Some have created their own patterns and others have used Australian animals as their focus. 

Dean has chosen to do an Echidna. Background work to come. 

Mikayla has used patterns and earthy colours to produce this fantastic patterned piece. Almost finished. 

Maya is using a huge range of techniques to incorporate patterns and a snake in her design. Background work will finish this piece off. 

William Morris - Inspired Art

The Olympics were a perfect opportunity to try out some new art ideas. We looked at an artist and textile designer known as William Morris "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris" who lived in the late 18th century. His company Morris & Co. still produces textiles today. In a lot of his artwork we noticed repetition and rotation of the same objects. We decided that this would be our focus for our own Olympic inspired artwork.

We searched for an image from the London Olympics that we thought looked interesting and that we thought had the potential to look weird, strange or brilliant when it was rotated and repeated.

 We then imported the image into Pages where we masked any part of the image we wanted removed. We looked at masking the image so that in had "Points or Places" were the image would meet up again.

The next step was to duplicate the image before vertically and horizontally flipping them until we had a wallpaper in the style of William Morris.

Some images gave a better effect than others, but my students were really happy with the end result.