In Visual Arts, we have welcomed Mrs Kaye Crowe to our Senior School Visual Arts Faculty, Mrs Ann McDermott as a full-time Visual Arts Teacher in the Junior School (Years 1-6) and Mrs Kathryn Kurilowich (Years K-1). Our new teachers have a wealth of experience and have already made a positive impression on their students. They have quickly become valuable members of our expanded Visual Arts faculty with Mrs Clarissa Sutherland and myself.
These specialist Visual Arts teachers now facilitate our Curriculum, which extends from K-12 at Thomas Hassall Anglican College. This brings artistic concepts, creative thinking, problem-solving, and skills into the lives of our students much earlier. Students can now build on these over the years ahead.
This semester, the Senior College students have begun the year with a variety of preliminary work.
Year 7
Our students have been learning about the proportions of portrait drawing, the different forms that can be created in Visual Arts, colour mixing, and the importance of tone in a drawing.
Year 8
Each student has been learning about watercolour techniques and how they can be used in a painting to show different effects, including applying rock salt, rice, and brush techniques. These techniques will be applied to a more considerable aquatic-themed work shortly. Year 8 Experiments using rock salts, coffee, and rice as an effect on watercolour painting
Jod K Elements of Art Fish Artwork
Year 9
Students have been creating still-life drawings and learning about proportion, scale, and tone, which help create depth and form in their artworks. They are learning to draw even transparent glass, a complex technique. Individual students and groups of students have been creating their still-life settings similar to those of the Dutch Vanitas painters, e.g. Caravaggio, Harmen Steenwijck, etc.
Year 10
Students have been creating album covers that ultimately include aspects of a self-portrait. Their image is abstracted or distorted through printmaking techniques, including gelli pad printing, eucalyptus transfer methods, painting, and printing directly off a mirror using paint and a fine mist of water for effect.
Year 11
Students are learning about Modernist Art Movements and starting to create their own paintings using the techniques and ideas of the various artists from each art movement e.g. Monet and Impressionism. Visual Arts student Ana N has just started her portrait painting (only one or two lessons so far), but it does show how an artwork starts with a basic outline and how the form is built through tonal washes and layers of paint. We will look forward to seeing the end result towards the end of the term.
Ana N
Year 12
Students have been creating individual artworks called a “Body of Work,” which they submit to NESA for external marking in Term 3. These works can be created in any form of artmaking and include the student's own ideas and concepts. Currently, we have students creating paintings, drawings, digital photographs/ videos, and sculptures. However, some students may add or change their Body of Work as the year progresses.
It has been an exciting start to the year, and we look forward to creating final works for their assessments in Semester One.
Mrs Genelle Griffin
Visual Arts Coordinator
