Art Club #14

Last Tuesday, we had our wonderful year sevens back!! Yay!

It was their first session after the holidays so we were naturally very eager to get them excited about art club again, and we let ourselves be persuaded to do something outside. In my previous Art Club post I mentioned that it was -20. Well, we could now call ourselves true Russians, because we went out, bundled up and feeling a slight chill, as the thermometer dropped to the very, very fun -25 mark. I may need to note that I personally had no scarf, was wearing a skirt complete with thirty den tights, and had very fortunately left my gloves. But then again you could say that it was a noble sacrifice for the sake of art. Or that it was my own fault for agreeing to the idea in the first place.

The project itself was to get them painting on the snow in front of the school grounds using some poster paint  in squirty bottles. To minimise our exposure to the elements, we got them to sketch some ideas first, before actually moving outside. Our initial concepts were to create images which would in some way link to the school subjects, like a book for English or a butterfly for biology or a percentage sign for maths. When thinking about an apt representation of the art department, we really wanted to get Ms. Platt to make a snow angel and then fill in the contour of that snow angel with paint, but she quickly left at the suggestion, so we had to settle with making snow angels ourselves.

None-the-less, we had fun outside, since the year sevens seemed completely impervious to the cold for some fantastic reason, and ran around with bottles of paint squirting everywhere as we shivered in the knee-deep snow.

Their health and safety was our primary concern though, so we made them go back in after fifteen minutes or so, when I felt my fingers to be quite literally petrified, and spent the next ten minutes desperately trying to get warm, or scrubbing off stray paint splatters from wet snow-pants. At the very least, we made some pretty drawings in the snow, had some fun in the fresh air, and got to appreciate being once again warm.