My Favourite Place

What you'll need:

  • Large pieces of drawing paper.
  • Photographs and drawings
  • Variety of everyday materials such as foliage, flowers and advertisements
  • Coloured pens/pencils
  • Scissors
  • Sticky Dots

Ask your pupils about places they love to visit, whether it's in the country or city, perhaps it's the seaside, the fair or a football stadium to see their favourite team. Discuss why they enjoy being there. What makes that place so special and how they can convey their feelings in a collage.

Arrange a visit to a part of the local area of particular interest to the children. Encourage them to make notes about interesting patterns, textures and colours they see.

Encourage them to develop the habit of collecting and recording visual information and storing this for future reference such as a visual diary, or objects with interesting textures, which can help them develop their ideas. Explore how shape, form, space, colour, texture and pattern in a collage can communicate their feelings about their favourite place.

Examine the art of collage and compare the work by different collage artists. Discuss methods or approaches used and how they relate to ideas in their work.

Example of collage artists:

Peter Hutchinson creates realistic photographic collages of flowers, trees and mountains (see top of page). By including large images of flowers, most of which the artist has grown himself, the landscapes turn into more surrealistic surroundings. The same treatment is used for his collages of cityscapes, mixing up various locations visited by the artist, even from different continents.

Joanne Casey, (pictured above) as successful American collage artist, uses her own handmade papers, rice papers, twigs, feathers, and shells to create her landscape collages. She combines these textures and patterns not just the scene, but its mood too.

Useful Links for Further Discussion

Related themes for class discussion

Our changing environment: will global warming threaten our beautiful landscapes.
Our changing lives: we all go to football matches, fairgrounds and so on, but do we still go out as a family.

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