On Thursday 20th June, Year 3 enjoyed a visit to Southampton Art Gallery. The children were fantastically well behaved and an enjoyable day was had by all. The children took part in a workshop to create a piece of monoprint art. They learnt that mono means ‘one’ and that each piece of art they print can only be printed once. Firstly, they had to draw the outline of some flowers – it was commented on how good the children were at careful observational drawings. Then, they had to turn the piece of paper over, and by holding it up to the light, they had to roughly add colour by using chalk pastels. The final step was to lightly place their drawing, colour down, onto a layer of ink before going over their outlines with a pen. This transferred the ink to their colour pictures. The results were absolutely stunning and the children were very proud of their work.  They also had a chance to look around the gallery and all adults on the trip were impressed by how the children were able to talk about the different pieces and discuss colour, light, shapes and subjects. There were some fantastic suggestions about what abstract art could be of, and about why the artists chose to paint different things. The children were great detectives at working out the age of the paintings by looking at the style and colours used.

All in all, both adults and children had a wonderful day and came away with a better appreciation of different styles of art.