Summer 1 | Clitheroe Pendle Primary School

This half term we are studying Impressionism. In the 19th century a group of artists in France, started to draw and paint landscapes and scenes of everyday life, like cooking, sleeping and bathing. These may seem fairly normal things to see in art now, but in the 19th century most of the art that was made in Europe had much grander subjects such as battle scenes from history, or stories from ancient Greece and Rome.The impressionist artists were not trying to paint a realistic picture, but an ‘impression’ of what the person, object or landscape looked like to them. (This is why they are called impressionists). They often painted thickly and used quick (and quite messy) brush strokes. Most of the paintings before impressionism have a much flatter, neater surface and you can't really see the brushstrokes at all.

We are really enjoying using watercolours! We have been creating our own masterpieces at home too, fantastic!

Week 5

This week we added the finer detail to our Turner marine paintings. We added ships and stormy seas and some of us added detail like stars to the dark night sky too. The paintings are really impressive and we are proud of our achievements. We are going to create a display outside our classroom on the LK2 corridor.

Week 4

This week we have found out about Joseph Mallord William Turner, known as J. M. W. Turner. He was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive use of colour, imaginative landscapes and turbulent marine paintings. We found out a lot of facts about his life and observed many of his paintings. We then used water colour paints and sponges to start a marine scene. We will add the finer detail to this later.

Week 3

This week we recreated the ‘Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies’, (Claude Monet 1899). We mixed watercolours and used tints and shades. Wow we have some super artists in 3P!

Week 2

Monet Water lilies

Week 1

This week we examined the six key features of Impressionism. We represented them creatively in our sketch books using watercolour paints. Like Impressionist artists we did not blend in the marks made by the paintbrush and we mixed colours using tints and shades.