Wallop!

Posts Tagged ‘KS1’

Classroom Creatives

23 May 2012

For the last couple of years or so, I’ve been leaning more and more towards the work I do as a sideline (to my everyday design and illustration work as ‘Wallop!’), teaching Art and design in various forms to primary school aged children. It’s something that I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed and I’m delighted to have now become a partner in a collective of artists who offer bespoke and unique Art workshops more widely to KS1 and KS2 pupils in and around our local area of Hampshire.

My partner in crime and I, Kathy Mason, who have worked together in school for some time now have just launched ‘Classroom Creatives’ with a Stopgap flash website in situ and a facebook page. Please do go and have a peek. A ‘like’ would be even better to keep up to date with our events and offerings.

To Kick Start our new collective we wanted a logo and a look that was fun and entertaining, so would appeal to our young artists but was also professional and business like for those Art Co-ordinators who might commission us. The brand I came up with combines simple sans serif type with a ‘doodled character ‘ formed by combining the initial ‘C’s of the two words. This character can be altered to become a different gremlin or doodlebug for the different uses of the logo and lends itself perfectly to be animated blinking or swaying for our online purposes.

Our new brand appears on the web pages and litererature we send out to schools and also on sets of badges and certificates awarded to the participants of our workshops.

We’re looking forward to a happy and successful future, sparking the imaginations of our young artists, one school at a  time :-)

Watch this space to follow our progress :-)


Exploring perspective in photography, Slinkachu style

18 July 2011

As part of last week’s Art Week, (a series of Art Workshops I ran alongside my very talented colleague Kathy Mason – more to come on those soon), I took a class of 30 year 2 pupils for a digital photography experience. The children in this group are still very young and attention spans are relatively short so I planned for short bursts of fun activity with quick results.

I introduced the class to the work of Slinkachu – a favourite artist of mine who creates unlikely street scenes using tiny scale models. The children were enthralled from the very beginning and very enthusiastic. I’d ordered a selection of models more usually seen in architectural prototypes and armed with pockets full of these, we set out to change the school grounds into the land of the giants… The results were truly wonderful. Imagination is limitless when you are 7 and I spent the morning surrounded by that x 30.  Pure delight all round.

Perhaps my favourite shots of the day were courtesy of Stanley, the best stomper in the class whose shadow I captured about to squish the teeny tiny people. Obviously a herd of such ‘monsters’ then ensued but this remained the most inspired shot of the morning.