Pop Goes The Doughnut!

With a nod to International Dot Day, which took place on 15 September, and in the spirit of Vashti, the young artist who features in the popular children’s book, The Dot, by Peter Reynolds, The Art Room was filled with creativity, courage and collaboration this week! Encouraged to just “make a mark and see where it takes you” the children were ‘popping’ with ideas and rose to the challenge of making their own ‘dotty’ art works using only circles, dots and rounds.

Once we’d explored the themes of The Dot, our session continued with a brief introduction to Pop Art, a bold and colourful style of art that became popular in the 1950s and 60s and which used images from everyday life, like comic books, snacks, celebrities and advertisements as their subject matter. We talked about Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, who often repeated the same image many times, like a row of soup cans in different colours, which gave his artwork a fun, eye-catching pattern. Others, like Roy Lichtenstein, incorporated features from comic book pictures into his paintings such as speech bubbles and Ben-Day dots – a printing method using tiny, coloured spots to make different colours and shaded areas on the illustrated page without using too much ink.

Inspired by the candy colours, dots and repeating patterns of Pop Art, the children used the simple ring doughnut as the central motif for their fun and vibrant art works.

First the children explored different ways to print colourful backgrounds to make their own unique patterns using sponges, cotton-buds, stencils and bubble-wrap to transfer paint spots of various hues and sizes to the paper. Next, we switched to more subtle washes of watercolour to sweep around the doughnut shapes carefully drawn in pencil by each child, taking care to add little half-moon shapes to give their sweet treats a three-dimensional feel.  To enhance the appearance of the shiny, sticky glaze the children took advantage of the wet-on-wet technique to achieve light and dark areas of colour, remembering to blot out extra paint to give the impression of highlights and gloss. 

Lastly the children joined the dots by pairing each rainbow-coloured doughnut, sprinkled with tiny spots and swirls of decoration, with contrasting printed backgrounds. By the end of the day The Art Room was filled with pops of colour and delicious looking artworks, oozing with joy and innovation!