A school of birds

From Highgate Primary School in Western Australia, we welcome these incredible portrait birds of some incredibly creative and curious kids! Chani Crow is an artist and teacher based at the school and is doing amazing things with each of the lucky classes. You can see more of Chani's inspired ideas and kids artwork on her fabulous new facebook page promoting and featuring art in primary schools.

In keeping with the BIG side by side theme, we fly the grade 4 and 5 class contributions with a response by the teacher herself to the same task. An artist bird always flies with her flock!  Each one of these birds has such an animated and interesting personality and we are completely bowled over by the quality and expression of these young artists who have taken part in our first ever BIG school collaboration. 

Here Chani explains the process in response to our BIG prompt of creating bird portraits: 

We started the project with a brainstorm of all the birds we knew and some of their more unusual features (toucan beaks, emu legs, peacock feathers etc..). I then asked them to name particular personality traits associated with particular birds (wise owls, happy kookaburras, dramatic peacocks etc...the rule was that it had to be a positive character trait). They then had to design themselves as a bird with an emphasis on showing their unique personality. They were able to use particular features of birds that they knew or create a new creature altogether. We then added colour to the birds, laminated them and added a strip of magnet to the back to they can be taken home to 'fly' around on the fridge!"

Chani's portrait bird flies with her class flocks from Years 4 and 5