Art & Design Foundation Stage 3

I have been doing a lot of research lately & I felt (geddit?!) that I needed to get back to practical making and experimenting, so taking my photos of an honesty seed in its seedpod as inspiration, I got out the felting books that I have borrowed from my sister-in-law, looked up a few felting tutorials and got busy! Felting is something I have not had much experience of, but looking at these macro photo's, it seemed the obvious medium to use. After a little research, I found out that wet felting is the process best used to make a felted fabric, and dry felting or needle felting is how you add surface decoration to either the felt fabric you have made by wet felting, or any other suitable fabric. These are some of the tutorials I watched on wet felting: http://www.feltbetter.com/feltmaking.asp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNMs2LSXq70 I also borrowed a couple of books from my sister in law: Feltmaking by Deborah McGavock & Christine Lewis Art in Fel...

After going to Kew Gardens, we hopped back on the tube and headed back to South Kensington to the Natural History Museum to see their botanical illustration room. No disappointment this time! We headed straight to the Images of Nature Gallery to find the botanical illustration gallery: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/galleries-and-museum-map/images-of-nature.html Botanical Illustration is the art of depicting plants in both a scientifically accurate and beautiful way. The illustrations should be accurate enough to enable identification of a plant and will often include a main image of the plant at it's most beautiful, accompanied by smaller images including details of leaves, flowers, seeds, cross sections and close-ups. It may also include details of insects that it attracts or settings where it is likely to be found and text descriptions. We saw some of the earliest and most beautiful botanical illustrations, some original but also on the video screens with short fil...

On Monday I went to Kew Gardens to do some biological and historical research on seeds, especially their composition and their dispersal mechanisms and how far they travel. I was rather disappointed to say the least...at this time of year I wasn't expecting much to be in flower, but I wasn't expecting 3/4 of the facilities to be closed for maintenance/refurbishment before the Easter weekend (there wasn't even a discount on entry!) so there wasn't much to see or do. Most of the information I managed to glean from here came from books in the gift shop! I did find inspiration in a few things though: I had already been thinking of covering enforced migration - slavery - in the human parallel of my project, however I hadn't fully realised the extent to which exactly the same has happened with plants. The plant hunters of the 19th Century sought plants and seeds from all over the world and brought them back to Britai...