What a lovely week we have just had at school! We took part in a whole school Art Week, which was a great opportunity for us to practise our creative skills.

Toucan Class focused on the artist Vincent Van Gogh, who is a famous painter. On Monday we learned some facts about him and looked at some of his work. We discussed what we liked and disliked about his work, and what we noticed in each of his pieces.

We chose to focus on his painting called Starry Night as we have been learning about stars in space for the last couple of weeks. We noticed that he used lots of different shades of blue in his paintings, so we began our process by colour mixing. We worked on making various shades of blue, by adding more and more white to our dark blue paint.

We also learned that Van Gogh uses small brush strokes when painting, which we could really see when looking at the night sky in Starry Night. We then practised making these small brush strokes using thin paintbrushes. We attempted to do circles and swirls as Van Gogh had done in his painting.

Later in the week we began to recreate his painting. Firstly we painted the night sky and afterwards we used the skills we had learned earlier in the week to complete the painting. We used various shades of blue to show the wind blowing in the picture and used small brush strokes when painting the moon, wind and stars.

On Friday morning Miss Neulaender came to work with us. Her class had been learning about Lowry this week and she came down to teach us about him too. All of the children completed a charcoal drawing by the end of the morning.

After school next Monday and Tuesday, parents are welcome to come and see the work we have been doing. The classroom door will be open from 3pm on both days so that parents can come in to look at their child’s sketch book with them.