By Mrs Button (Year 6 Teacher)

The Year 6 Art Club has been working towards an entry for the National Art Gallery’s Take One Picture competition and this is the submission we have entered: 4500 minus 1. The students in the club began working on the entry in the Summer term in Year 5 and have carried on since moving into Year 6.

The competition is based around the National Art Gallery choosing a picture from their collection to inspire artists around the United Kingdom. This year, the artwork was Surprised! by Henri Rousseau. After having studied the painting, we decided that the tiger in the painting interested us the most and the art skills the students wanted to explore were water colours and papier mache.

The resulting tiger is made up of: a papier mache head, watercolour for the body and collage for the legs and tail. The watercolour took a few attempts and the students needed to study the patterns in tigers’ fur closely to try to imitate the types of shapes they could see.

The title for the artwork is based on the information we found out about tigers being an endangered species and that there are only 4500 left. Sadly, a large factor of their dwindling numbers is poaching; quite often their skins are used to create rugs. This is why we decided to make our artwork into a rug to highlight this shameful waste of such a majestic animal.

We will not know for a few months how we have done in the competition, but we are very proud of our piece of art!

Robyn (6I) said: “I loved being in art club and creating this piece of art because it was fun working as a group and doing art.”

Tiana (6B) added: “Our art work is important because it is spreading awareness about the evils of poaching and how we need to protect tigers from this fate.”