Satellite City

Satellite City

Today, our rainy day art-making transformed the things I'd kept from a previous activity into the finished piece above. It's mixed media, and it's a city - a combination of London, Monaco and a made-up place, apparently. Overall, it reminds me of a satellite Google map - hence its title Satellite City.

It's turned out to be an interactive work of art too; the cars have been racing round its roads all afternoon.

Buddy was in charge of street planning; he laid out every last section of road on the city-print cloth.

Buildings were cut out from our previously printed paper and include the Gherkin, St Paul's Cathedral, Buckingham Palace and the London Eye.

Here's a selection of our printed paper from which the buildings were cut.

And this is the printed cloth that became the city's background.

So how did we previously create our printed materials?

By squelching, stamping and hop-scotching in paint-bottomed footwear - that's how.

Buddy and Daisy have wanted to try this ever since hearing about teacher and author Steve Light; his students accidentally made shoe-print art when they stepped in some spilled paint. I love Anna of The Imagination Tree's brilliant take on this activity too; her daughter ran around the garden on flattened cardboard boxes whilst wearing 'painted' wellies - looked like great fun.

Light went on to use various shoe-prints as collage illustrations for his fantastic book The Shoemaker Extraordinaire. Buddy and Daisy are fascinated by his cleverly created shoe-print world and it's great that we've now made one of our very own in Satellite City.