Year 8 Visual Art students have been learning about the elements of art such as line, shape, colour, tone, form, texture and space. It has been a fun start to the year experimenting with perspecive in photography and drawing mediums. Students were challenged to represent one element in each letter of their name and show space and form by drawing in one point perspective. 

The elements of art are the building blocks of arts practise and responding. The Year 8s will be focusing on making and describing them this semester. 

On Friday the 4th of March, senior art students welcomed South Australian Artist Alex Beckinsale to teach them how she approaches drawing. Alex acknowledged the anxiety behind ‘letting go’ when it comes to making art. The students started looking at basic forms, then adding in tone to create “representational blobs”. Many Years 10, 11 and 12 students have not used charcoal before, and they were challenged to work with the properties of the medium to create a tonal scale. We started by covering an A2 page in charcoal and erasing our highlights with an eraser and darkening areas for shadows.  

This technique did not start out looking like a portrait, but as they started to add in facial features and other details, the work started to come together with fantastic results. Many of the artworks made during the workshop will be on display at the end of year student exhibition at the Courthouse Gallery. 

Amy Tilbrook