Chapter 3: Making Art Works 29

Description Instructions

Approach: Level: Time:

Resources:

Key attributes (1 low – 4 high) Qualities Mean scoreyear 4 year 8

Global Rating (1 low – 6 high)

(whole insect) Insect Collage

Independent task Year 4 only 30 minutes

Three A3 size black and white photographic pictures of complete insects.

Each student: set of A5 papers (grease proof, tissue, grey, cartridge, copied hessian,

copied newspaper); scissors, glue stick, sheet of A3 manilla.

The teacher administrator gave the followinginstructions:

In front of you, you will find a range of papers and a piece ofbrown manilla paper to use as a background sheet.

You are to make a make-believe or fantasy picture of an insect,using the different papers.

To help you get started, we have some insect photos that will giveyou some great ideas. These pictures are to help you think ofshapes and textures, so that you can invent your own insect.

Try to use your papers in interesting ways. Try to show interest-ing shapes and forms. And choose papers because of the tex-tures or patterns they have.

expressiveness image relevant to the task; expressiveness, fantasy, imagination.2.3 (2.7)

composition unity; balance, but not necessarily symmetry.2.3 (2.7)

detail finer features included; variety of shapes; use of textural and tonal contrast(e.g. torn/cut, textured/plain, light/dark, narrow wide, delicate/bold). 2.3 (2.7)

use of media edge quality; use of overlap, overlay, folding, crushing,3 dimensionality. 2.2 (2.6)

2.9 (3.4)

By cutting, tearing, overlapping and arranging the papers, youare going to build up a picture of an insect - a picture of theinsect’s whole body.

Make your insect as big as you can for the piece of brown paper.Don’t make too many of the pieces too little, or they will take toolong to stick down.

Arrange the papers where you would like them to be for yourpicture. About 10 minutes before the end of this activity, I willgive you a glue stick, so that you can glue the pieces of paperonto the brown piece to finish off your picture.

The ratings given to year 4 stu-dents’ collage pictures werespread across the full range of lowto high with 59% marked in themiddle range of 3 or 4.

Instructions

Students were not penalised forincomplete drawings

year 8 (head)

year 4 (whole)

654321lowest mark Ratings highest mark

% o

f st

uden

ts

Global ratings: Insect collage

11

22

40

19

7 1

30 NEMP Report 2: Art 1995

A profile insect with sort of hairylegs, wings and antennae. The eyehas been given life with the subtleplacement of a small white trianglewithin the black square. There isn’ta sense of the legs being thought-fully shaped. It seems importantthat there were three of them (rep-resenting a half viewpoint ?) and thatthey have something happening onthem other than being plain edged,straight lines. But the decision touse tissue paper on the legs meansmuch of the effect is lost. We arenot easily aware when tissue over-lays the white as we are when itoverlays the textured papers.

A relatively conventional insect form:a double-winged dragonfly! Niceuse of the textured newsprint forantennae. The body tends to fallapart a little because those blackand white contrasts are perhaps toostrong for the rest of the body, whichis rather delicately represented.Parts tend to disappear against thatextreme contrast, and instead thefocus has become a very carefullycut flower in the foreground. Thestudent is starting to work towardsmaking a picture of an insect ap-proaching a flower rather than stay-ing on and refining the insect itself.

A coherent and nicely balanced im-age with each part of the body givenits own separate textures. The hes-sian textures are used to give a kindof hairy legged quality and the an-tennae are given the same treat-ment. The central form of the insectis a repeated series of lozenges. Itis a convincing if not overly devel-oped collage. The student has re-ally only made use of three of thepapers that were available, and haskept them in separate parts.

Insect collage exemplars mid range

Chapter 3: Making Art Works 31

This insect is somewhat humanoid.It has arms, legs with block feet,eyes, nose and a large belly but-ton. Its head piece can be readlike a mask. This, then, is the de-velopment of schema from a per-son into an insect. It is areasonably successful attempt inthose terms. It doesn’t hold to-gether well mainly because eachpart has been given its own sepa-rate paper colour . Thus there is atendency for it to fall apart into itscomponents rather than read as awhole. There is some success increating some of the shapes.

A very simple potatoey bug shapewith two little wings stuck on top,three little legs stuck below, multi-ple eye forms, a mouth, and a sting-ing tail. No real attempt has beenmade to shape the body or legs.The black square eyes arranged ina repeated layout tend to dominatethe whole picture. You lose thedelicate wings since they are notsufficiently contrasted with thebackground. There has been astrong preference for textured sur-faces so when the few plain sur-faces are used, like the black, theyhave an overly dominant effect.There is no use of the white paperfor contrast or shaping.

A very simple 8 legged insect form.A sort of potato shaped body witha head form attached, but no at-tempt to integrate the feelers withbody or to give them any detail. Aswith the antennae, the legs give anappearance of being stuck on asan after thought, although an at-tempt has been made to extendthe meaning of the legs by addingsmall pointed segments at theends. There is some attempt atstriping the body but these are sim-ple rectangles applied in a pat-terned fashion. Because there isinsufficient contrast, and major ef-fect in providing decoration islargely lost.

Insect collage exemplars

32 NEMP Report 2: Art 1995

Insect collage exemplars lower range

Chapter 3: Making Art Works 33

high range Insect collage exemplars