• Working scientifically

• Using straightforward scientific evidence to answer questions or support their findings.

• Identifying differences, similarities or changes related to simple scientific ideas and processes.

• Healthy minds, including emotional wellbeing, resilience, mental health

• Playing and exploring

• Active learning

• Thinking critically

Look together

• What is this artwork made of?

• How do you think these young artists made the paler marks on this toast?

• How else could you shape or colour bread to make an artwork?

Unconventional materials

The children who made this artwork have used an unusual material, bringing a playful element to their picture-making. They started with the burnt surface of toast and scratched away to reveal the paler bread. They challenged themselves to use unconventional art tools: teaspoons and wooden knives.

Artists often create marks by removing colour rather than adding it: Scraffito is the art of scratching into the paint layer to make lines. In monoprinting, a printing plate can be inked up and then colour is rubbed away with a rag or tool before printing. What unexpected materials could you choose, to play with these removal techniques?

Make it your own

Discuss what other kinds of food you could use to make art. You might talk about natural dyes or consult our fruit and vegetable how to.

Look together

• How many objects are stacked here?

• How would you describe them?

• Have they been arranged in order of size, or weight perhaps?

Balancing act

This sculpture engages with our innate desire to stack objects in a tower, playing with balance and alignment. The artist has taken a simple act of play and developed it into a lengthy production process: these stacked boxes are made of wood and covered in cement panels. The steel top part appears to balance precariously.

What questions do you ask when you’re stacking objects? How high can they go? What happens when they fall? Could you make an artwork that asks these questions?

Look together

• Let your eyes wheel around these curved tracks—where do they lead?

• What shapes and colours can you find?

• Focus on the rows of dots. What do you think they’re made of? What do you think this sculpture is made of?

Colourful constructions

This artist works with sheets of metal and joins them together with hundreds of rivets—a pin that holds together two bits of metal or other material—to make a relief sculpture.

It is a collection of fragments, corners and edges, combined into something new that has never existed before. What do these shapes remind you of? Perhaps a landscape, or a machine, or the body.

How do the painted colours on this sculpture add to the element of play? Do you think the artist had a set of rules, or a plan in mind?

Make it your own

Make abstract reliefs from recycled materials and then paint it in bright colour, using playful intuition.

Look together

• What sort of place are these people sitting in?

• How have they chosen to pose for this portrait?

• Focus on the hands – are these drawn ‘correctly’? Do they look exactly like real hands?

Observation or expression?

The artist made this painting by looking at a photograph of herself and her daughter. She has used broad brushes and slippery oil paint, enjoying the rhythms of stripes on her jumper and lines around faces and hands.

When we’re drawing or painting people, we might feel the goal is to capture a likeness – to depict every observed detail. When we look at our drawing and compare it to our model, we can experience disappointment that it doesn’t look more similar or accurate. However, this artist is more interested in expression and feeling than observation. She says this painting ‘felt like us’.

Look together

• Compare these pots or vases – are they all the same shape?

• Which colour pairing do you enjoy most?

• How do you think the artist made the lines of paint?

Drips and spills

This artist has applied modern industrial paint to ancient Chinese urns, mostly from the Han dynasty (206BCE-220CE). This act makes a political statement against the Chinese State. At the same time, his process of letting paint run down the sides of each jar embraces chance and unpredictability: we can’t control the pull of gravity on liquid paint.

This can easily lead to frustrations when we’re working with paint or glue which can seem to run or spread against our will. We might decide the artwork is ‘ruined’. Alternatively, we can choose to welcome the effects of drips and spills as an element of the making. We can’t always control the drip, but we can control our responses to it.

Make it your own

Make a drip painting to help let go of expectations of control. Place multi coloured paint in different jam jars and create a whole class drip and spill painting, allowing each child to choose paint to throw onto a giant piece of paper. Once finished, decide whether the painting or the jars with the spilt paint are the work of art.

Look together

• This head is seen from different angles – how can you describe this or show it with your body?

• Do you think the artist moved his pencil quickly or slowly?

• Why do you think he has drawn her several times over?

Corrections and choices

A pencil drawing is a quick way to test ideas and experiment with different viewpoints. The woman seen here may have been moving, so that the artist needed to make revisions and changes as he drew. Lines overlap and one drawing is made over the top of another: in places there are multiple contours and corrections. The artist leaves it all visible as part of the process, reworking and changing his mind, but not rubbing out.

Look together

• What do you think this person is resting her arm on?

• Follow one of the red brushstrokes: how does it change?

• Where do you see areas that were wet – where one colour has washed into another?

Pools of paint

Watercolour is a fluid medium that can be applied in layers or veils of transparent colour. Unlike oil paint, it dries quickly and this artist uses it to make a swift study for a larger painting.

Her design is based on paintings by Angelica Kauffman which are installed in the RA entrance hall ceiling, including Invention. Both artists focus on the active gaze and gesture of the female figure, in contrast to traditional passive representations of women . They both challenge the traditional image of the male artist wielding a paint brush and vigorously applying paint to canvas.

Look together

• Scan the painting for the lightest areas – what do you find?

• Do these colours remind you of the natural world?

• How could you make the ridges that criss-cross this picture?

Sculpted paint

This artist has always had a very experimental approach to paint. In his earlier works he poured the paint directly onto the canvas. In paintings like this one, he experimented with adding strips of Styrofoam to his pictures to create a geometric framework.

The painting is vast: almost 3.5 metres wide and too large to paint at an easel. Laying the canvas onto the floor or pinning them to the wall allowed the artist to move around them in new ways to apply the paint.

Make it your own

Experiment with large scale painting surfaces: wrap a table in paper, or make a collaborative painting in the playground. Try using different tools to apply paint.

Look together

• Which words would you use to describe this sculpture?

• What makes colours change?

• What can you see in this sculpture?

Painted sculptures

Artists add colour to sculptures in lots of different ways. Artists working with clay usually add colour to their object with ceramic pigments. Unlike working with paints, the heat of the kiln changes the colour. That means, when an artist paints colour onto their sculpture or mug, it often looks completely different after they remove it from the kiln. You can think of what comes out of the kiln is a collaboration between the artist, the pigment, and the heat.

This artists’ sculpture is abstract, so it’s not supposed to look like anything in particular. But, like a cloud in the sky or a patterned wallpaper, you might be able to see lots of different things in it.