Inside places
Art Making Activities

Activity 1: Shapes and buildings (Stage 1 students)
Using various coloured paper cut geometric shapes such as squares, triangles and rectangles arrange these to build houses, shops and other kinds of things you might see in the city such as bridges or factories. Think of these shapes as building blocks and overlap them. When you are happy with the placement you can stick them down with glue on a backing sheet.

Activity 2: Shapes, buildings and crossword puzzles (Stage 2 students)
Collect as many crossword puzzles as you can find. Cut these out of the newspaper or magazines and then use coloured pens or pencils to colour some of the squares with different colours (like windows in tall buildings). Paste blocks of cut coloured crossword squares onto the top half of a piece of A4 paper in landscape orientation (avoiding gaps between the grids) to create buildings. On the bottom half of this paper you can add a street that goes from left to right of your picture in front of the buildings. To create the street you can use a strip of black card paper (same width as backing paper) and paste this on the bottom section of your picture below your buildings –hopefully this sightly overlaps onto the coloured crossword section. Draw some lines to show the dividing lines in the middle of the street with white chalk or crayon and maybe add some cars or trucks, stop lights and street signs to make it look like a busy place in the city.

Activity 3: An imaginary marketplace (Stage 3)
Look at the print titled Eternity by Martin Sharp showing the Haymarket buildings in Sydney. Haymarket was a place where you could buy lots of fresh foods and lots of other things. Sketch an imaginary market place with special stalls and fun things to see, eat and and buy just outlining the objects. Use a white wax or oil crayon or a clear wax candle go over all your final pencil lines . Then colour in your picture with red, blue, yellow drawing inks using soft brushes (colouring is the same as used in Eternity). The wax should resist the dyes and you should be able to see all you white lines magically appear.