Friday, 13 March 2015

Victorian Arts and Crafts

While we seem to be very artsy lately, and having to continue with studying the Victorians, we decided to look more into Victorian art:


Of the many interesting artists who featured prominently in the Victorian times, we decided to focus on William Morris and the arts and crafts movement.


First, we looked through a book on Victorian Art that gave us an overview of how the arts and crafts movement developed in Victorian Britain.  Then we looked specifically at a few examples of Morris' wallpaper and textile prints to understand how and from where he got his inspirations from.


We learnt that William Morris got his inspirations mostly from nature, so I gave Tiger five pieces of post-it cards to design different patterns on.  Tiger was inspired by birds and the leaf patterns of a potted plant.

When the designs were made, we scanned each of Tiger's design onto the computer for him to work on each to create various patterns from each using the principles of either tessllation or overlaps.


Next, I asked Tiger to think of how he would create a poster for an exhibition of William Morris' work.  We brainstormed a few ideas together before Tiger decided that he wanted to have Morris' portrait as the main subject with a changing background to show Morris' versatility in various craft forms.


To achieve that, Tiger first traced the portrait of William Morris onto a sheet of tracing paper.  Then, he attached different sheets of nature-patterned craft paper behind the traced portrait.  Lastly, Tiger stuck a few Victorian-inspired embellishing pieces onto the tracing paper.  The end result is that there are three layers to the poster:
  1. the Victorian embellishments
  2. William Morris' portrait
  3. changeable nature-patterned paper

Tiger felt that the three layers are important to convey William Morris' style of work where Morris often used three different layers of patterns in his textile and wallpaper designs.



This post is linked up to:
  1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/10/15
  2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 46
  3. The Virtual Refrigerator
  4. History and Geography Meme: Magyars and Bohemians
  5. Collage Friday: Faces of American History
  6. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the learner's permit!
  7. My Week in Review #28

11 comments:

  1. I love this idea -it pulls together so many strands both in terms of William Morris but also in terms of history, art and computing.

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    1. Thank Sarah. Like you, I really like it when a topic covers many areas at the same time. That just makes learning that much more fun and engaging. :-)

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  2. That's a rather interesting bit of artwork Tiger created. I like the layers.

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    1. Thanks, Ticia. The artwork this time is indeed quite different from what we've done before. I'm glad you like it! :-)

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  3. William Morris wallpaper - how quintessentially English! What a creative idea, and beautifully carried out by Tiger.

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    1. Thanks, Lucinda. It's interesting to see where the study of history can lead us. I certainly wouldn't have thought of looking into William Morris had it not been for the study of the Victorians! :-)

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  4. Thank you for your encouraging comment. :-)

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  5. Very cool! Thanks for linking up.

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  6. Great project! I love how it turned out - and I think I will add that book to my wish list and check it out. Thanks for linking to the Virtual Fridge!

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    1. You're welcome, Kym! I hope you'll have fun with the Victorian art project at some point too! :-)

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