Māui and the Sun Sgraffito Art
Philippa’s new entrant class came to art room today. It was the first time that they had joined me for a lesson and they were very excited. Some of the students had spent time in the art room on their 4 year old school visit so they were extra confident about the day ahead.
Today’s lesson was investigating how we can use art to tell stories. We used the Māori legend of How Maui Slowed the Sun as our subject matter. We explored the use of line, pattern and colour to show emotion in our art.
The students made two pieces of art today depicting the sun from the legend of How Maui Slowed the Sun. The first piece of art was a variation on the pottery technique, sgraffito. Sgraffito means ‘to scratch’ in Italian. It is the process of adding glazes to pottery and then scratching them off to reveal contrasting colours, patterns and textures underneath.
The students prepared their work by colouring their paper with warm coloured pastels, working hard to fill in the white spaces. Next they painted black acrylic paint over top. I like to add a drop of dishwashing liquid to the black paint to help it scratch off easier.
While the black paint was drying, we looked at the art in Peter Gossage’s retelling of How Maui Slowed the Sun. We studied the facial features of the sun and identified the emotions that he felt in different parts of the story. The students chose an emotion and used pastels on black paper to draw a study of the sun.
When the black paint was dry the students created a second artwork. They chose a contrasting emotion to their original artwork. They thought about how they could change the facial features on their sun to show this new emotion. The students then used the back of the paintbrush to ‘draw’ their sun onto the black sgraffito paper.
I am very proud of how the students worked today and they can be pleased with their efforts. Check out the finished artworks out below, I think they are beautiful.
