Today year 9 took the art classroom outside. The students are doing some direct observational drawings for their new project “A Sense of Place”. The students used viewfinders to select an area of interest to draw, then set their timers to do quick studies in only 15 seconds, 30 seconds, and 1 minute. This exercise helped the students to focus on shape and form before moving on to doing their more detailed drawings. It’s always a challenge drawing from life instead of a photo but this method brings energy and originality to the art we create.
As part of the forces and motion section of the year 7 course we were investigating how the size and shape of a parachute determined how quickly it falls. Various shapes were tested but the equilateral triangle performed the best. Three cords performed better than four. Threading the cords onto the parachutes was a fairly tricky task!