They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Lest we forget.

This week, during our workshop, we took a little time to reflect on the up and coming ANZAC centenary and what this significant history means to our country and our community today.

We painted simple poppy fields with water colour and I encouraged each artist to include some meaning in their work. For most of them, the meaning came with the number of poppies they painted. Some painted one for each fallen soldier from within their extended family, while others painted one for every decade leading up to the centenary. We also explore the concept of closed/budding and open/blooming poppies and how we could incorporate this into the piece with significance.

Water colour can be quite a challenging medium, in that you need to ensure you have your brush loaded with just the right amount of paint, otherwise once on the paper, the paint can get away from you and run into parts of your picture you weren’t intending it to go. There’s also the ‘bleeding’ factor to contend with, as colours can tend to meld together, creating an entirely new colour. We do quite a bit of water colour work, so the children are well versed in this, but with this activity, some of them chose to paint the background first and then paint the poppies to see what effect they would get. One comment was that in some places, it looked like it was “Tye died”. Rad!

Beautifully thought out pieces.

xx