Students are carving it up in the visual arts room.

Every year we get to experience a range of technology areas. These are: Food Technology, Hard Materials, Visual Art, and Digital Technology. Students from other schools also attend N.I.S to experience these learning areas each Thursday afternoon and on Fridays.

This term in art tech, Whaea Rachael is teaching everyone about lino carving and printing. For our sessions, we did some designs and were shown different techniques for carving - so we don’t cut our hands. For example, keeping your non-dominant hand away from the carving template has been a useful thing to know.

The second step is printing a design with two different colours. A technique to examine the colour choices and impressions can be done with a crayon rubbing. This is done by using the side of the crayon/pastel of the two colours we are going to use. We can assess what we prefer for our final product.

The aim of visual art is mostly to have fun and explore but to also practise skills and techniques like drawing, colouring, perspective designs and so on. Last year was a good example of this; we did perspective designs in our books, then carved the designs into some clay.

Art is really fun and rewarding for the students because they can experience new and interesting ways to be creative.