Community Shelters Project - Kimpton Primary School & Parish Council

Community Shelter Project: Kimpton Primary School & Parish Council

For this location, we worked with Kimpton Primary School and their year 6 students, who created the wonderful artwork which is proudly being displayed on the shelter. 

Below you can read more about the extensive process the students and teachers used to create this wonderful art.

We began this unit by learning about Indian block printing watching a video showing expert craftspeople designing the patterns, carving wooden printing blocks, and then printing onto fabric. This inspired the children, giving them high-quality examples to explore.

The natural environment is a huge inspiration in Indian block printing, with most designs featuring plants, flowers, leaves or animals. As a school community, we are guardians for nature and protecting our planet. We used these ideas to design our own printing blocks. We made life study sketches of leaves and flowers, simplifying them to create the final design on our blocks. The pupils also planned the colours and placement of their printing blocks.

Printing using polystyrene presented its own challenges. Our pupils showed resilience and determination as well as creativity in printing onto the fabric to produce the final piece. They thoroughly enjoyed the process and took their time in ensuring each print was exactly how they wanted.

This work all happened during our “Well-Being Week.” The added purpose of knowing that their prints would be used for the bus shelter spurred the class on to create stunning pieces.

Below are some comments from a few of the students who took part in this project:

‘We then made a page of Indian block art that we chose from printed out sheets. We picked ones that we liked the look of and cut them out in any shape we wanted. We then wrote some observations about them like what we could see in the patterns like a tear drop and lotus flowers.’

‘As a class we went outside and picked an interesting leaf. We also had fresh flowers and leaves in the classroom that Mrs Gorton brought in to get some nature ideas from, we then all did some pencil drawing of the leaves and flowers at different angles.'

‘We also looked at abstracted art from the internet to give us more ideas and then added patterns on the outside.’

‘We drew the patterns in pencil to work out our design, 1 large square and 2 little ones and 1 little design to be the test tile.’

‘When I was making the patterns into the tile, I didn’t do it deep enough, so I needed to press down harder. We also had a few broken tiles or made holes from pressing down too hard with the pencil.’

‘Before we did it onto the fabric, everyone planned their own design on squared paper, and everyone chose their colours and coloured in the squares to show the plan.’

‘I chose colours to look like nature and the ocean since I love swimming and diving.’

‘I picked greens and blues because they went together like nature.’

‘I picked my colours because I like them and thought the pink would stand out.’

‘I decided not to use yellow that I had in my plan because it might have been too light.’

‘We found the colours and took the tiles we wanted. Put them into the paint to get the colour we wanted, rolled the back of them, pulled it out and then put it down on the space on the napkin we wanted and rolled the back again gently.’

‘I had a one that I liked but it broke. I pressed too hard with the roller, and it broke the corner and I had to make a new one that looked identical.’

‘I had a plan, but I put one block lower than my plan so then I added some more blocks to make sure it still had symmetry.’

We hope this has created an enjoyable space to visit, for all in the community regardless of if you use the bus or not.

Below shows images of the before and after: 

This project has been made possible through funding from the Department for Transport and the Bus Service Improvement Plan.

The artwork on this shelter will also be displayed at the Kimpton Art Show in the village church on the first May bank holiday, more information on this can be found here. 

If you would like to leave any feedback about this project, please contact us here.