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

Two artists think on a ship

  

Chloe's clay bird

Two artists sit on a pirate ship while Kindergarten kids dance around inside.

The artist, 40, asks the artist, 7, why do you so like making art?

The artist, 7, replies "Well it's just like my thing, well it seems so simple when you get really good at it, and I am really good at it."

"I just get my ideas by imagining them in my brain, when I think of something cool I just make a picture of it. I think other artists might make little stuff then they make it then it all really comes out of your brain".

"Imagination is when you think of cool stuff and you want to try and make it real, or sometimes it might be real and you want to draw a picture of it and that is like a memory."

"I was about four when I first wanted to be an artist, and that's when I did my first really great painting and there were no really white spaces on it, it didn't look like anything real, I did lots of colours, I did lots of grey and then I put lots of colours over it, then my mum put it in a frame and now we have it in our living room, so like I would never forget that time"

The older artist remembers the younger artist as a student when she was 4 saying "I am going to be Picasso when I grow up". When pressed about how she knew about Picasso, the younger artist said "I already knew about him when I was born." 

"Well one day I was making an angel when I was at pottery and I made this angel I glazed it and my mum saw it and she really liked it and I felt proud of myself"

"You don't have to learn to be an artist you just have to be a really good thinker" says the artist, 7, to the artist, 40.

Indeed.

Thank you Chloe.