Sixth-grade art — Banksy-style

By Mike Golschneider
Art Department Chair

The transition from Lower School to Middle School art marks a period of change for Foote School students. In addition to being challenged by new concepts and ideas, student artists have access to a wider variety of middle school appropriate tools and materials.

Sixth grade art begins each year with a robust printmaking unit and we begin to use those new tools immediately. For our first project, sixth grade artists learned how to depict an image using positive and negative space shapes. This will conceptually prepare them for the culminating project in our printmaking unit where they carve linoleum sheets to produce linocuts.

Students made single layered stencils inspired by the semi-anonymous street artist, Banksy. Each student found a reference photograph with strong contrast to create their stencil. Next, they simplified the image by drawing only the dark areas and shadows. These negative space shapes were then cut out with an X-Acto knife in manilla tag board to form the stencil. Acrylic paint was used for the backgrounds, giving the student the choice to create an abstract field of color or realistic environment for their stencil. Each student sprayed multiple iterations of their piece, the first in black paint to learn the process, followed by experimentation with multiple colors and techniques.

This year we worked with our facilities team to create a Foote School-themed piece by power-washing a stencil onto the stairs by the North Building. While the delicate Falco stencil didn’t survive the power washing process, we still managed to render a compelling piece with atypical stencil usage.