Incredible Insects

 December 15th 2020 - Summer Learning Journey - Task 2

Today the Summer Learning Journey challenged us to create a piece of art work using nature around us, the artwork was inspired by Raku Inoue, a Japanese artist who only uses leaves, barks, flowers and other things found from his backyard to create spectacular artwork like these...

If you would like to look at more art by Raku, this website has hundreds of cool photos!

To make the insect in photo 1 I used, a Chestnut seed casing (for the body), 8 small twigs (for the legs), and 2 thorns from a rose bush (for the fangs).

And to make the insect in photo 2  I used, a Lavender (for the body), green/unripe blackcurrants(for the eyes), ferns (for the antennae), 6 sticks (for the legs) and Zinnia petals (as wings).

Here are the final results!

Photo #1 (above)

Photo #2 (above)

I also made some more insects, however this time I chose to make some butterflies. To make the butterflies I used petals from flowers, the pistil, stigma, style and ovary (the middle of the flower). The types of flowers I used were... Nasturtium, Pansy, Alyssum, Chickory, Shirley Poppies, Marigold, and Salvia. Here are the butterflies I made...

                 

Petal Butterflies

My brothers teacher, Mrs Shaw, challenged him to create butterflies out of flower petals. This may sound weird but it is very cool. This looked way to fun for just my brother to have a go so my whole family joined in and made some. You make them using the parts of flowers including the petals and the inner part of the flower. We used Nasturtium, Pansy, Alysum, Chickory, Shirley Poppys, Marigold, Salvia and a few other not sure of names. Here are my family's creations - 

Sunny, Sunflowers!

Mrs Fisher, a teacher at my school who teaches year 1's & 2's planted some Sunflower seeds around our school with her class. Over the past couple of weeks they have bloomed into bright yellow healthy flowers. Mrs Bennett, my teacher took my class out to take pictures, pencil sketches and write down ideas and details about them. After we had done the planning we came back to our classroom and painted them, for my sunflower it took a couple of coats of paint to get the perfect brightness of yellow. After we had painted them I added some details with pastel. We got the option of using dye, watercolour or paint for our background, I chose to paint my background with dye. Here (above) is my work. We also did a small piece of writing with our art which I will be creating another blog post about.