Celebration event 24th June RSA London

The celebration event for the project went really well. Julie was in London early to hang the artwork along with the other artists and then the school visited in the afternoon.
It was a shame that not everyone could come because of exams but nice to have pupils, parents and teachers along. Hopefully everyone enjoyed seeing the work from the other projects as well.

Good news as well Creative Junction (project co-ordinators) have decided to buy 2 of the pieces of artwork for their offices. The school will receive the money for this and the students will be able to decide what they want to do with it.

It had been an enjoyable project to work on and hopefully SEGRO will continue to fund work like this. It seems strange that it is over now, especially after such a good ending.

Finished pieces

Julie has finished all the pieces and framed them ready for exhibition in London at The Royal Society of Arts in June. Here they are stitched to their backgrounds before they go in their frames.

Day Five - final one, constructing our pieces

Today we worked hard to construct our final pieces from the felt we created last time. We had to cut out shapes and stitch bits on. Now we can see how individual our groups pieces are. All the pieces are so different but fit well together because of the medium (felt) and the sizes. They will all be framed in the same way too. We had to edit our original designs a bit as well, just because things looked different to the way we had planned, we had to take into account the felt making process as well. Julie is taking the pieces away to finish off the last bits and frame them up. We are all looking forward to going to see them in the London gallery in June, even though it is quite along way away.

Day Four - Constructing the final pieces

On Tuesday we spent the day constructing our final felt pieces based on our designs. We were missing a few people so the rest of us had to work extra hard; Lots of felt making to build our muscles! By the end of the day we had constructed all the elements to our pieces ready to put together in the last session.

We have ended up with 4 pieces and hope that we can fit them all in in the exhibition space (even though the limit was 3, they are smaller than the allowed amount though!)

Next time we are going to do some stitching and finishing off of the pieces, some may need a bit of reconstruction as well. We need to keep the frame sizes in mind and look forward to producing some professionally finished pieces. We are all planning already what we will spend the money on if we sell any of our pieces!

Day Three - Working with Felt

Today we explored creating our own felt, none of us had done this before, so it was good to try something new. Initially we made a flat sample piece in our own design and then played around with some 3D ideas, we made ball shapes and some of us tried other ones. We ended up with different miniature hat shapes too.

Later in the morning we spent some time thinking about what our final pieces would look like, what they would have in them and what techniques we would need to use in felt to create them. Our designs were then drawn out to scale to make us think about the amount of work they would take to create, the colours we would use and if we could incorporate any 3D elements.

Next time we will create our designs large scale, ready for the final session where we will embellish them.

Day Two - Exploring ideas further

We spent the day trying to explore our ideas further, trying to work with smaller themes in our groups that connected us all together. We had ideas of mechanics, industry and the business man as well as the world itself. In the morning we explored print making further using press print and mono print techniques, layering up our images along the way. In the afternoon we used more joined ideas and produced some group collage work. Next is to decide on what we plan to do for the final pieces and what media we are going to use to create them. Over half term the group will explore their ideas further on their own as well as Julie the artist working with us who will help us tie all these bits together.

First Full Day, which Direction?

Today as the whole group we looked at the project brief and started to try and make sense of the 'World of Work' theme. We answered some questions to make us think about the theme, drew in our sketchbooks, and then created some modroc sculptures exploring our initial ideas. In the afternoon we looked at some of Julie's art work to try and give us ideas of things we could do in our project. Most of the group decided they would like to do something new and different and decided we would like to explore some textile techniques, like Julie does. Next session we have decided to try some collage and printmaking to continue exploring our theme.