Mulberry Street Arts

A little side project from last year working with some awesome students from a local school!

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And they’re up!

So happy to see our Stobie pole designs now brightening up Main Road in Coromandel Valley!

Well done to all talented young artists who contributed! Your native bees, butterflies and flowers definitely brighten up the neighbourhood and your patience with the process and artistic skills are to be commended!

Thanks so much to the Blackwood Action Group who coordinate and install these - the opportunity and support your members provided was fantastic.

You can spot these gems near Minnow Creek! Amazing effort everyone!

I am very grateful to have been able to create a mural with students from Bellevue Heights PS this term! A group of students from years 4-6 (aged 10-12 ) helped to design and paint this colourful piece using acrylics and poscas. This piece will decorate a beautiful space in the garden, home to much loved chickens + various fruit and vegetables! A new scale (and process) for me which was so much fun, all made easier with the support of the amazing (and knowledgeable) staff & of course the amazing staff and students at BHPS. Can’t wait for this one to be installed!

A sneak peek at our final self-portraits… this time using watercolours, acrylic, sharpie and poscas. Final creations being kept a well kept secret 🤐 for parents to unwrap soon!

More plasticine self portraits!
These ones were ‘snapped’ before being sent home with their creators and like their creators are filled with personality! Our focus was identifying and sculpting basic shapes to make facial features and building up interesting textures with various tools and techniques.

Shiny happy people in the art room this week! We continue our focus on self portraits identifying basic shapes we can use to make our faces and features. Lots of squeezing, squishing, rolling, pushing and bending to manipulate modelling clay (aka plasticine) into these miniature beauties 🧒🏼👧🏻

Getting the term started with some spooky self-portraits! 👻💀🕸 We started by practicing how to draw skulls first with a strong focus on careful positioning and placement of shapes to create recognisable features. Then...lots of fun colouring with oil pastels and adding patterns and embellishments to create a skeleton version of themselves! Inspiration from https://www.artteacherinla.com with some 'day of the dead'/sugar skull influences.. Here's a great website to read more about the Day of the Dead celebration: https://dayofthedead.holiday #spookyart #itsallinthedetails #kidsareamazingartists

Progress shots of the stobie pole designs we have been working on this term in after school classes. Unknown territory for me having never worked on something like this before and it definitely brought with it some challenges! Each child has contributed with their own addition, 20 children in total over a few weeks. Pre-drawings and paintings (including sketches, bee & butterfly art and close-up acrylic flowers) all adding to the students knowledge, confidence and abilities to add to this collaborative design. As a process we have been thinking about how to create an interesting composition by turning objects and moving them ‘off the page’ or creating a sense of space by placing behind other objects, working in layers and holding our brush carefully. We also needed to have had a few side projects including a ‘mini’ stobie pole design (their choice but just including nature in some way)for students to keep working creatively while small groups worked on their areas. Still some more painting to be done but getting close to being complete! Students are aged 6-10 years

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Finished close-up flowers!

Acrylic Painting PART 1!

This term we are working towards painting stobie poles in our local area. The themes is native bees, butterflies and the flowers that attract them.
This week we have been painting flower close-ups. Inspiration from American artist Geogia O'Keeffe and her stunning flowers + photographs of a variety of daisies. We focused on drawing 'off the page' and working on our brush skills, painting inside shapes and mixing our paints on the paper (as opposed to on our plates which we also did for a bit of fun at the end).

To be finished next week!

Lots of fun and skills making these butterflies! This technique uses watercolour textas,alfoil and wet paper to create a kind of mono print perfect for creating background colours and washy effects. Students then used brushes and hand coloured areas they wanted to stand out more.

🦋 drawing from observation
🦋 proportion, symmetry and detail
🦋 using thick lines for emphasis
🦋 exploring colour mixing
🦋 simple printmaking techniques

The students loved this process so much that we made some extra prints just for fun at the end 😊

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Bee sketches large and small! Observing details and loosening up our sketching by trying different pencil grips, pressures and mixing it up by creating 'scribble sketches' using crayons tied to sticks!