Over the last few months fellow studio artist Glynis Johnson and I have been working on a textile banner project with pupils from Newcomen Primary school. The banners are based on their four house groups which are named after explorers. These famous explores are Sir Francis Drake, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Richard Grenville and Walter Raleigh.
Design and Development
Inspired by the explorer theme we wanted to create four explorer sailing ships using withes covered in a papier mache. The banners would then become the sails.
Each house group/explorer is represented by a different colour. Working with this idea the sails on Drake’s ship would be mainly blue, on Sidney’s red, on Grenville’s yellow and on Raleigh’s green. Using fabric crayons a map of the world was drawn onto each main sail in their corresponding colour. Incorporating a variety of different techniques the children then added animals, sea creatures and sailing ships to the banners. Image maker was also used to add images of nautical implements, ships and the explores themselves.
The final stage was to batik the waves of the sea onto the banners before carefully hand painting on the colour.
The children did an amazing job and worked really hard on this project. The result is brilliant. Well done pupils of years 5 and 6!
The ships are going up on the wall this week which is very exciting, however there is still a little bit of tweaking to be done.
Watch this space for images of the finished ships hung in position where they will be on permanent display for many, many years to come.
