During our first day in Year 2, we created some portraits of ourselves using sketching pencils! We discussed the different pencils and also how to create accurate facial features using different shapes and shading. We learnt more about the different pencils we can use to create different effects and we will be learning more about this as the term goes on. 

This week, we have learnt more about the artist Leonardo da Vinci. We discussed key facts about his life and thought about what life may have been like when he lived. We learnt that he was also a writer, engineer and inventor as well as being an artist! We studied his most famous painting - the Mona Lisa - and recreated this ourselves, also writing about his life and recalling key facts. 

This lesson, we have focused on sketching techniques and different sketching pencils. We learnt more about H and B pencils and the numbers 1-6 when describing these. We shaded using the different pencils so that we could get a better understanding of how these work ready for our own sketches over the next few weeks! 

Our focus this lesson has been on the shapes of different facial features. We discussed how eyes are not circles but are more oval shaped and have detail that we need to include in our own sketches. We looked at a picture of a soldier, which will be our stimulus when we sketch our own soldier portraits, and tried to replicate the shape of his different features. We also experimented with using sketching pencils to create hair and eyebrows. Have a look at some examples of our work below.

Our sketches are finally complete! We applied our learning so far to combine all our skills together and create these sketches. I think you can see how far the children have come since our first lesson