Medals all round

Whether traversing the slopes on holiday or catching some ‘big air’ on TV, many of us enjoyed the thrill of winter sports this half term. So, for our first session back in The Art Room, we wanted to capture a similar energy and dynamism in our artworks by creating winter-athlete drawings and sculptures inspired by this year’s Winter Olympics.

We warmed up for our creative, alpine endeavour with quick, stick-figure sketches to build confidence in representing the human form and to remind ourselves that by making slight adjustments to the placement of a leg or an arm we can animate our figure with movement and activity. Next, we studied the Winter Olympic icons designed to represent the different competitive winter sports and to better understand the body shapes each athlete adopts in order to carry out their individual pursuit.  Having picked their favourite winter sport, each of our artists used the remainder of the session to bring it to life through their figure-based artworks.

Our youngest artists progressed from brightly coloured, Olympic drawings to making simple but dynamic 3D figures from pipe cleaners and had great fun twisting and shaping them into athletic poses of their choice.  Our older artists used large sheets of tin foil from which to carefully roll, scrunch and manipulate limbs, head, torso and joints into exciting three-dimensional forms. Freestyling with creativity, we were treated to the zesty tricks of snowboarding and skiing, the balletic poise of ice dance and the graceful lunge of curling. To showcase their amazing sporty figures, the children designed individual display boards that captured, with colour and enthusiasm, the action, scenery and equipment featured in their chosen Olympic sport.  The Art Room podium was full of gold medal-winning endeavour by the end of the day and it was a joy to see so many personal bests!