See You Outside

Impressions Gallery

We have had a very busy two weeks preparing for our Project Celebration Even, which took place on Friday 11th July at Impressions Gallery Studio in central Bradford.  This is what our invitation looked like:

And this is a photo taken in the Gallery on the day:

The celebration exhibition was a great success with children and young people from Brackenhill and Salt schools meeting up for the very first time.  Sadly, no one from Idle school came to the gallery, perhaps they were put off by the dreadful rain and chilly weather conditions.

All the artwork looked fantastic in the big white spaces of the gallery studio, although it was a challenge not being allowed to fix work to the walls.  Its amazing what you can achieve with foamboard and concertina books!

We were very pleased that some parents, friends and relatives were able to attend as well as people from Friends of Buck Wood.  Everyone was impressed by what the children had achieved during the project.

Magic Sunshine Prints

During our last morning at Idle Primary School we made some special prints with Class 2.  We called them 'Magic Sunshine Prints' but their real name is Cyanotypes. Cyan is another name for blue.  Cyanotypes are a kind of photography.  We placed leaves, grasses and flowers on the special paper outside in the sunshine, with a sheet of plastic over the top to hold things down in the wind which was quite blustery.  Here is a picture of Viv and some boys creating their cyanotype.

The sunshine makes the paper go dark blue except where the leaves have been, which stays pale blue or white.  Its like capturing the shadow of your object.  After a couple of minutes in the sun, you put the paper in a bath of water to fix the image.

The children from class 2 made lots of wonderful patterns with their leaves and petals.  Angie and Viv had collected all the green things from Buck Wood in the morning and brought them into school.  This was the opposite of last week when all the children were collected at school and brought to Buck Wood!

Here is a picture showing just three of the 14 amazing cyantoypes that the children made.

The ferns and the Wild Rose petals are especially beautiful, but you can spot Holly and Oak leaves too.

More Lovely Leaves

Here is another set of six beautiful leaves, this time they are ones made by children from Year 2 Idle Primary School.  You can see how the colours from the salvaged envelope paper make the pictures look different depending on whether they are blue or manila.

Well done Rebecca, Nathan, George, William, Harry and Lucy!

Can you see that an insect has chewed a hole in George's Ivy leaf?

Lovely Leaves

Here are six lovely leaves made on-site at Buck Wood by children from Year 1 Idle Primary School.  You can see how carefully the children have looked at the different leaf shapes and you can tell which tree they belong to.

Well done William, David, Ellie, Olivia, Courtney and Nathan!

Making Connections

Today we had a brilliant morning and afternoon at Idle Primary School, making lots of artwork with the children from Years 1 and 2.  There’ll be lots about that soon, and we’ll show you our pictures.  But in the meantime, on the way home Angie and Viv called in to Haworth to get a cup of tea in a café and they saw this Rabbit money-bank in a shop window.

Rabbits remind us of the children from Brackenhill  Primary school who were painting pictures of the rabbits at Ogden Reservoir in April, using our fantastic mud paint.  But what’s amazing is that this rabbit is made from blue and white china just like the plates the children from Idle Primary school were drawing last week!

Colourful Return To Buck Wood

On Tuesday The Mayfly returned to Buck Wood, dressed in her brightest colours.  The fabulous bunting the children made last week looks spectacular under the leafy green canopy.

 
Children from Year 1 and Year 2 were on the site of the old Open Air School all day long, with artists Angie and Viv and lots of helpers.  We looked all around where the school used to be, and found more pieces of old plates, medicine bottles and inkwells!  Next we went on a tour through the wood, looking at all the wonderful trees, and how their leaves are so many different shapes.  The children very carefully collected a few samples of leaves from each kind of tree to take back to our base.  We found Oak, Beech, Holly, Horse Chestnut, Sweet Chestnut, Silver Birch, Ash, Rowan and Sycamore, plus the shiny green ivy that grows all around.

The children know that paper is made from trees, and so if we recycle paper we are helping to save trees from being used up too quickly. The paper that Viv and Angie gave the children to use for their artwork was all collected from old envelopes.  We used the paper from the inside of the envelopes - there are Manila ones and dark blue ones and most of all, pale blue ones with loads of different small patterns.  All the children enjoyed looking carefully at the leaf shapes and then drawing them using Oil Pastels.  Angie and Viv think the leaf artworks are excellent and they are going to make them into a big  book.

 

Very Good Work

Here's another couple of our very good blue and white plates with their proud makers.