In art this term, Year Three have been focusing on printing and the work of William Morris.
We began by learning about the famous designer, his intricate wallpapers and stained-glass windows, and the repeating patterns he used, before moving on to learning about different printing techniques. The children noticed that William Morris used a lot of natural motifs in his work and it was decided that this is something we would look to use in our own pieces.
We then spent time drawing simple flowers, leaves and fruit, all things we had spotted in William Morris’s work, which we could then use for our own printing. We made sure to keep our designs as simple as possible as this would help when repeating them and when printing. Before we began printing, we worked on repeating our designs in our sketchbooks, looking at how the images flowed into one another and how the separate parts could be made to feel connected and part of the same design.
The following week we began to print! At first, we used everyday objects to carve out our designs and experiment with pressure, colour and position. We used potatoes, cardboard and sponges to do this. Again, we really noticed the importance of keeping the designs as simple as possible on the first print, which allows us to add more detail when we do our second print in a contrasting colour.
During our last art lesson, we used a new printing medium – polystyrene tiles. We thought about our previous lessons and experimentation and built upon that to create to reusable designs that we could print in a repeating pattern. It was quite tricky to get this right as we really wanted to add detail from the beginning! However, with perseverance we were able to create the first layer of our repeated pattern prints.
Watch this space to see how we continue to develop these ideas, adding more colour and detail to our initial designs…