Feature artist: Stephanie

I have another painting from my feature artist Stephanie who was 6 when she painted this delightful image.

Once again we can see the repetition of shapes and colours. The shapes have been grouped into squares, circles, triangles and a flower shape: each bird having a different set. Stephanie is a thinker and is drawing on her knowledge of "sets of things" which is a concept taught early in schooling. Whilst the bird's all have the same tail pattern their combs differ as if she thought this was a good way to distinguish between them. But what I particularly like is that their beaks show different positions of opened and closed. She is a very observant child. She has even used two different ways to draw their legs and feet.

Stephanie's use of colour is fascinating. It would appear that first she drew the heads, combs and bodies of the birds following this by painting each bird's head pale yellow. She then painted in the blocks of colour blue, red and yellow around the birds.  I think she drew in the tails and feet over the blocks of colour. Then using the red paint she painted three bird bodies, one comb and two tails. Notice in the bird with the flower shapes she repeated more heavily over the flowers and the tail so that the deeper red colour stood out from the background. Again evidence that she is thinking about what her end painting is going to look like. She wants the patterns on the birds to stand out hence highlighting the red squares and the yellow triangles. The "blue bird" in the lower left hand corner stands out as dominant. It is slightly larger and is the only bird painted blue with only a touch of red on the tail. Stephanie is beginning to show an awareness of composition in her paintings and the importance of highlighting one particular aspect of a painting whilst maintaining continuity through the repetition of patterns, shapes and colours. A thoroughly impressive painting for a 6 year old. I love it.