Project Galaxy

My students had a lot of fun creating this large scale group display. A wide range of media was used; including conté crayon, oil pastel, tempera paint, glitter and felt tip.

This is exactly the sort of ‘mixed media storytelling’ artwork that I find really engages young people. It gives them the chance to create pieces individually, and then combine their work together to create a larger visual narrative. When a diverse group of people come together to make a picture, they begin to transcend their differences and form a community. However transient that community may have been, the piece of artwork serves as a permanent reminder of its existence.

I particularly like this detail from the mural. The purple planet was created using tempera paint. As this type of paint is so thin, the brush strokes remain clearly visible when it dries. The students exploited this by using the brushstrokes to emphasise the spherical form of a planet.

Some of the students experimented with three dimensional materials.  One student used scrunched up paper balls to make the shooting star. Another young person used pipe cleaners to create six pointed stars which were then dotted around the piece. The rocket in the top left corner literally pops from the page, as the student used pop up book style techniques to give the piece extra dynamism.

Elsewhere students worked in oil pastel and conté crayon, to populate their galaxy with a diverse array of aliens, robots and spaceships.