Week 1: Authors communicate through words - artists communicate through colours. I feel very fortunate this week after launching a six week partnership with a Leeds primary school. Working with twelve of Year 4's finest, we will be exploring the creative processes of authors and artists using as a stimulus, The Island by Armin Greder. The book's beautiful but haunting pictures provide the perfect context for discussing how illustrators use colour to develop and change the mood of a text. Children discussed the emotions associated with primary and secondary colours and were surprised to discover they have both negative and positive connotations. Using Rothko's colour panels as a guide, the first group developed 'mood boards' using warm and cool colours. I was impressed with how they could discuss the significance of the colours they had chosen. Year 4's Rothko-esque colour mood boards The second group went further and used colours to indicate the c...
