Book review on Curse by Joseph Delaney

Curse

Written by Joseph Delany

Illustrated by David Wyatt

Curse is an ambitious thriller written by Joseph Delaney, that will send you on a roller coaster of a ride as you read through this intriguing book. It's the second book in this amazing series containing 13 books hopefully with more to come.

Thomas Ward is no ordinary boy with a mother of mysterious background and a father like every other man. After he is apprenticed by the county's spook and sent packing, his future leans towards the paranormal and the darkness creeping in the edge of his mind. But as they set off towards priest town for a funeral following the death of the spooks dead brother, Tom senses his master's true intentions are to finish off what he started 20 years ago in the catacombs underneath the cathedral, hiding what he expects to be the death of him…

As soon as I started the first book of the series I knew that this was the series for me. I love reading the spooks series, it fills me with wonder excitement and thrill. The plot twists completely change your view of the story and the description of the events and and creatures help create images in your mind. This is why I Strongly recommend that you read all the books from the spooks series, I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Pastel blending

W.A.L.T blend and shade pastels using oil pastel media.

Me and my class have been doing some pastel art. In this piece of art we have been practising pastel blending and shading. To do this we watched a video on how to create a pastel picture of a moon and a silhouette of a boy in the clouds (the video is down below)`. We didn't have to follow the picture exactly, we just had to include a moon, blended pastel and a silhouette of sorts. I did a silhouette of trees and a moon as we were told to. We were also allowed to change the colour of the sky as long as we blended and shaded it.I decided to keep my night sky blue and black.

It took me about a quarter of an hour to finish this piece of art and I recommend trying it because it was really fun to do, and especially enjoyable to shade and blend the oil pastels once it was on  the paper. How do you think I could improve my pastel art?

My Black And White Abstract Art

This is my Black and white abstract art that I did with my class. We used Popsicle sticks, black and white acrylic paint, cardboard and paintbrushes. We did this as practice for when we’re painting/making our abstract resin table topper for the desks that we made at tech! We made this artwork by putting small blobs of black paint in a line using the Popsicle stick making them about a blob apart, we did this is the middle of our paper whether it was landscape or portrait. Then we did the same with the white but we did the line above or below the black. Then we got our piece of cardboard and scraped it through the to lines of paint. We did this only enough times so it covered the entire canvas/piece of paper that we were working on. Adding more blobs of paint so we could fill all of the paper. We didn't over-scrape it though otherwise we would of had a bunch of grey paint. When we had filled the paper, we got our card board and put the edge lengthwise in the paint on the paper. Then we pulled the piece of cardboard down a small bit in a straight line. We did this multiple times across around the middle of the paper length-ways. Then we got our paintbrush and - using little bits of paint - dabbed it starting from the top of the lines and going wider as we got to around 1/4 from the bottom from the line. Then we did a little white circle for the moon though I decided not to do that. We also added a bit more white paint blobs on the black and then we were done! I think mine looked pretty good and I'm really happy with it! If you don't get my instructions, please watch this video that I have put down below (this is the video we watched to teach us), the guy that made it did a great job!

Visual Art: Tessellations

W.A.L.T: Create a tessellation.

These are my three tessellations that I have drawn along with the rest of my class. The drawing that's coloured in and is made out of squares is the last tessellation that I did, I copied it of a picture from google images. I made my 2nd attempt at a tessellation look purposely like a turtle. And the first tessellation that I drew was, well the first tessellation that I did so when I did that I just played around with it and tried out this type of tessellations for the first time.

Here's how I made the first two tessellations that I did...
What you will need

1.  First I cut out a square/rectangle of card stock.
2. Next I drew then cut a shape/design on on side of the card and on the top side of the card.
3. Then keeping the design/shape where I cut it out of, I slid the shape/design to the side opposite where it was now.
4. I stuck the cut shape/design to the opposite side with tape, I did this for both sides.
5. After that place your stencil on a piece of paper and trace around it.
6. Slot your stencil into the traced version of it, and trace your stencil again.
7. Do this until your piece of paper is full.

If you don't understand these instructions then please watch this video for clearer ones.This video taught me how to make tessellations and tricks that makes it much easier to make them.

I found making tessellations really fun and I had a awesome time making them. For me it was kind of hard to decide on what patterns to do on the card, but in the end I eventually decided on what pattern to do.

Have you ever made a tessellation before?

Visual art: my charcoal drawings- abstract and Jim Dine.

W.A.L.T: Draw a tool in the style of Jim Dine. 

W.A.L.T: Find a artist style or a image we like and copy it in charcoal.

Cybersmart: Camera shots and angles.

W.A.L.T take photos from different angles and explain their purposes. 

Today Me and my friends Isaac and Julia paired up and did this slide for our cybersmart lesson, that we had today with Whaea Donna. We helped each other take the photos and we used different types of filters and angles, such as 'birds eye view' and 'wide shot' you'll see these along with a bunch of other angles in the slide below. The main purpose of this slide was to practice the different angles for when we take photos or video's so we could make a film for the Manaiakalani film festival. It was really fun taking these photos and I hope that we do something similar to this in the future for our Thursday cybersmart lessons.

Feel free to share in the comments any other types of photos, or different angles that we could or should have done in our slide.

Enjoy! C:

My Gabriel Moreno Art!!!

For visual art we had to do a style of art that is like Gabriel Moreno's whom is a famous artist. When we did this art we were told that we had to do it in black and white, which was kind of disappointing because a bunch of us wanted to do it in colour. I didn't actually get to finish my artwork because Mr Pickard took them away from us so he could take pictures of them. But they were still really fun to make and Mr Pickard did eventually hand them back out to us.

So here's how you make them. . .

1. First we had to think about the patterns and textures that were were going to use for our portrait. We also had to think about the light and dark colours that were going to be in it.
2. After that we our picture taken. When our teacher took it he took it of the side of our face.
3. Next he printed them in A3, and we were told to go and get our pictures once they were printed.
4. Once we had got our photos we put them against the window with a blank piece of A3 paper on top then we traced our photo onto it in pencil.
5. Once we had traced our photo we put our photo in our art folder and put the piece of paper we traced in on to on our desk.
6. Then we drew are patterns onto it.
7. And finally after that we went over the patterns in vivid, but we were also allowed to keep them in pencil and go over them in black pen.

I hope you like my photo of my zentangle/Gabriel Moreno portrait. Please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.