Perry created this map of a walled city as a self-portrait for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He said ‘I thought the walled city was a good metaphor – the wall, I suppose, can roughly be interpreted as your skin. But like any city, it’s dependent on the landscape it sits in as well.’

Using this theme, our students created portraits of ourselves via the medium of maps. Maps offered a creative tool to get students to think about how the parts of themselves interrelate. Which parts are bigger, and which parts are smaller? Which parts exist in a similar place? What symbols could we use to represent certain parts of ourselves?

We drew around grains of rice to create the outline of our maps, which was a fun and sensory way to get the ball rolling. Then, it was time map ourselves! There were no rules: if you wanted to fill your map with Xbox games, that was fine. If you wanted it to feature foods you liked, that was fine too. As long as it represented yourself, or an area of yourself, it was a success!

Our students learned how to use different tools, make marks and create beautiful designs that could be printed again and again. We practiced first on small stamp designs, and then moved onto making greeting cards and larger prints.

We also had a visit from local artist and printmaker, Charlotte Tyne. Charlotte showed us how she experiments with layering different colours to produce beautiful prints of landscapes in Devon that many of us know and love.

We’ve been off on a road trip this week, exploring Tidal Arts in Kingsbridge with our Arts Award students.

The students spent about an hour looking around the gallery and noticing the different styles and learning about the process behind some of those styles, as well as the journey from studio to gallery and life as an artist in Devon.

A big thank you to Lucy for taking the time to chat with us about her practice and the gallery; we left feeling inspired!

We asked our students to create self portraits using Arcimboldo’s style, based on the things that they were interested in.

Using a printed image of a skull, we set to work hammering some nails into wood — the hammering was a really good stress release — although the nails were a little fiddly!

Next, we wove our string around our looms to recreate the features of a skull. This project required a lot of patience and our students did a brilliant job staying on task and creating a unique piece to take home.