Koru Designs

We had a lot of fun making koru designs with pastels this term. We began by examining the colour wheel. We used it to discuss warm/cool colours. Everyone made their own colour wheel using pastels (inner circle pure colours, blending in a ring around outside to next colour.)

We tried to experiment with careful/subtle blending of colours.
The next thing was to examine the koru shape, we looked at where it could be found and discovered that it is inspired by the young shoot of a fern plant….) We practiced drawing our own koru shapes.We talked about using reflection, rotation and translation of koru shapes in our own designs. We had to fill a large black sheet of cartidge paper with 5-6 large koru shapes which we then applied pastel to the top of each spiral working their way down towards the centre. New colours were to be blended in carefully to give a smooth flow-on effect.

We tried to smudge/drag colours to achieve the results we wanted. We also noted how dull colours such as brown provide good contrast to bright colours for our border. Finally we filled in the background with black pastel taking care not to smudge the black into the other colours.

The finished results were incredible and they have brightened up the entrance to our classroom so much!!!