ART EXAMS - DATES
Tues 28th April - The CRAFTWORK exam - poster - 10.30 - 12.30 BREAK then 1.30 - 4.00 (5hr exam). This gives you
Tues 5th May - Still life & Life sketching exams (times to be confirmed)
- We have received the exam papers. In class today I gave out the themes etc. It is VERY important that you get stuck into researching this project TODAY, pin down a theme you like for the POSTER (craftwork) and do not let it drag on. When I see you again on Wed. I will give you a handout with the MARKING SCHEMES (I know I have give these to you many times before but just to refresh the memories!) and I will also have some of my own research into the themes for you. Although, everyones to have work/ images/ reserach with them on wed.
- For Fridays double class we will practice the 15min & 30mins (welcome to take some photos of the models poses too to practice at home)
CRAFTWORK - POSTER
Instructions
You are allowed to bring your A2 preparatory sheet (one only) into the examination to aid you in the
process of developing your design. This sheet must be signed and dated by your art teacher or principal
before the examination commences verifying that it is your individual unaided work.
You are not allowed to bring any additional visual aids, e.g. photographs, traced images or ready-to-use
artwork into the examination for copying purposes.
You are allowed to use any suitable craft materials and tools to fulfil the requirements of the examination.
The use of perishable organic materials is not allowed.
Write your examination number and level on each sheet and on the craft label supplied.
Write the number of the question you have chosen and its title on each sheet and on the craft label supplied.
Step 1: Preparatory Sheet (RESEARCH)
Your A2 sheet of preparatory work should be done prior to the examination and should consist
of your research. The contents should be a selection of personal interpretations and
researched ideas relating to the question you have chosen. Your work may be annotated. Work
on one side of your A2 sheet only. If, in addition to drawing in pencil, pen, paint or working in
collage etc., you choose to use photographs or printed images, all such images must be stuck
flat on to your A2 preparatory sheet.
Step 2: Preliminary Sheet (DEVELOPMENT) (10 marks)
In the examination you should do your A2 sheet of preliminary work first. This is a
development sheet where you should explore ideas that are in your preparatory sheet whilst
considering aspects of 2D or 3D design as appropriate to your chosen question. This sheet
should include evidence of significant further development of these ideas. The work
presented on your preliminary sheet should not be a direct copy from your preparatory
sheet. You may use annotated sketches to illustrate your developing ideas with particular
reference to the visual, functional and material considerations relevant to your chosen
question. In addition to your sketches of your developing ideas, you should show your final
design proposal which you will then make. You must work directly on to your A2 sheet
using sketches only, in colour if desired. Work on one side of your A2 sheet only.
Step 3: Finished Craftwork (90 marks)
Your piece of craftwork is made during the examination. You should refer to S11/15
for instructions specific to each question.
At the end of the examination you will be provided with a transparent craft envelope into which you
must put:
● your A2 Preparatory Sheet
● your A2 Preliminary Sheet
● other item/s (if specified in the question you have answered)
● your finished craftwork if it is two-dimensional.
If your craftwork is three-dimensional it should be placed on top of your sealed craft envelope with the
appropriate label
attached
POSTER THEMES:
3. Poster
Design and make a poster or a display card for one of the following topics:
(a) Artisan Food Showcase
(b) Poetry Slam Challenge
(c) Digital Technology Awards.
The full title of your chosen topic must appear on your finished work. Personalised handconstructed
and rendered lettering is preferred and should reflect the topic. You may use an
alphabet stencil which you have cut but the layout and spacing of the lettering must be done
during the examination. Stencils, where used, must be submitted.
Materials: ruler, t-square, papers for collage, card, textured materials, brushes, adhesive, inks,
paints, any other quick drying medium, etc.
The shape and type of advertising card you use can be of your own choice, but it must not
exceed A2 in its greatest dimension. If you wish to work on a sheet other than that supplied, the
superintendent must sign this sheet before the examination commences confirming that it
is blank.
________________________________________________________________________________
LIFE SKETCHING:
Instructions to candidates:
You are required to make two drawings of the model as follows:
(a) The first is of a 15-minute pose as described in this examination paper,
(a) First Pose,
and the drawing must be of the complete figure.
(b) The second is a more fully worked drawing of a thirty-minute pose as described in this
examination paper,
(b) Second Pose. You may choose either the complete figure or the
half-figure option.
N.B. If you choose the half-figure option, you must draw the pose as set and include the
head, neck, shoulders, upper arms and elbows.
You must draw from direct observation of the model (front or side view).
You may continue to work on your drawing during the model’s rest periods and during the
break between poses.
Size of paper: A2. Do not alter the size of the A2 sheet.
If you wish to use different paper from that supplied, the superintendent must sign this sheet
before the examination commences confirming that it is blank.
A separate sheet must be used for each pose.
Write your examination number and level clearly on each sheet.
You may use any suitable drawing medium, including colour. However, the medium you
choose must be quick drying.
You may suggest the background.
Do not crop or mount your finished work
(a) First Pose – Duration 15 minutes (20 marks)
The model should be in a standing position with his/her
feet slightly apart, left foot forward
a jumper/hoodie tied around the waist using the sleeves to tie a single knot
to the front
both sleeves of jumper/hoodie hanging below the waist
right hand holding one cuff of sleeve of jumper/hoodie, left hand holding
the other cuff
hands closed around each cuff, with back of both hands visible
head turned to the left and looking upwards.
(b) Second Pose – Duration 30 minutes (30 marks)
The model should be seated upright on a chair with his/her
feet crossed at ankles
both elbows bent with hands at chest height
left hand holding an orange with right hand peeling the orange
orange should be partially peeled with peel still attached
head turned to the right.
_________________________________________________________________________________
STILL LIFE:
Instructions
You may work in colour, monochrome, mixed media, collage or any other suitable medium.
However, the use of oil paints or perishable organic material is not allowed. You are not allowed
to bring aids such as stencils, templates, traced images, preparatory artwork or photographic
images into the examination.
Write your Examination Number clearly in the space provided on your A2 sheet.
Write the title ‘Imaginative Composition’ or ‘Still Life’ immediately below your Examination
Number.
If you wish to work on a coloured sheet, the superintendent must sign this sheet before the
examination commences confirming that it is blank. Maximum size of sheet: A2.
2. Make a Still Life work based on a group of objects suggested by, or described in one of the
descriptive passages: A, B, C, D or E.
You are required to bring relevant objects to the
examination centre for the purpose of setting up your own individual Still Life
composition.
This must be done in time for the commencement of the examination.
Your starting point and the rationale for your Still Life should be stated on the reverse side
of the sheet, indicating their relevance to the descriptive passage you have chosen.
Descriptive Passages
Passage A
Most every morning at nine, the emergency responders assigned to the Seine pull on their wetsuits
and swim around the Île de la Cité. In the course of their circuit around this teardrop-shaped island
in the middle of the river in the middle of Paris, the firemen-divers scour the bottom, retrieving bikes,
cutlery (which they clean and use in the nearby houseboat where they live), cell phones, old coins,
crucifixes, guns, and once, a museum-grade Roman clasp.
By the Pont des Arts, where lovers affix brass locks inscribed with their names (“Steve + Linda
Pour la Vie”), they retrieve keys tossed in the water by couples hoping to affirm the eternal nature of
their padlocked love. One bridge upriver, at the Pont Neuf, near the Palace of Justice law courts
where divorces are decreed, they find wedding bands, discarded when eternal love turns out to be
ephemeral.
As the central artery of Paris, the Seine naturally accrues the detritus of human civilisation and
relationships. Through centuries it has served as highway, moat, water tap, sewer, and washtub.
Its scimitar arc slices the city, dividing it into Left and Right Banks. Historically, Left was
bohemian, Right, aristocratic, but distinctions have blurred over time.
On the Île de la Cité itself, in front of the Gothic tracery of stone that is the Cathedral of Notre Dame,
is a bronze compass rose set into paving stones. From here – point zero – all distances from Paris
are measured. The Seine centres Paris; it is its liquid heart.
It is also, as the French say, fluide. No use commanding the Seine to sit still. A river stilled is no
longer a river. It changes with the time of day and season. Its currents carry the jetsam and flotsam
of life and death – lost plastic toys, escaped balloons, cigarette butts (Gauloises, naturally), empty
wine bottles, sometimes even a corpse – as they swirl, churn, flood and flow past the monumental
architecture of Paris. C’est fluide.
For one summer month in Paris the Seine becomes an urban Riviera, an ebb-and-flow of beach
volleyball players; sand-castle engineers; samba, tango and breakdancers; rock, jazz, soul musicians;
and sunbathers – who demonstrate the infinite variety of the human form. Space, like water, is
mutable, changing with the flow of time and events. “In the same space you can have freedom. Or
confinement.”
The Impressionists distilled its light into quicksilver. Claude Monet kept a floating studio on the
river near Argenteuil. Henri Matisse, a post-Impressionist, had a studio on the Quai Saint-Michel.
The flat, grey ribbon of water painted by earlier artists danced with opalescence through the lens of
the Impressionists. Their art reflected not just the flow of the Seine but the world as well. The
industrial revolution had arrived. Electricity hung pearls of light against the black night.
Construction of the Paris Métro was imminent. The rhythm of the world was accelerating. It was
rapid and fluid, and so was the brushwork of the Impressionists.
Adapted from Love and Loss on the Seine, by Cathy Newman, National Geographic, May 2014.
Passage B
It may seem hard to believe, now that Climate Change – or as it’s known in this country, More Rain –
has decommissioned our summers, but there are people in Ireland who remember good weather.
Those sun-drenched memories started the night before, with the making of the Holiday Sandwiches,
containing exotic fillings and cut with an extra flourish. Cheese singles, which tasted like a byproduct
of the petrochemical rather than the dairy industry, were put to one side. It was a time for
renewal and for sandwiches containing the likes of scallions and ham. The familiar bottles of salad
cream and Thousand Island dressing were decanted into little pots. A 500ml bottle of TK White
Lemonade, its packaging and labels long gone, would carry the milk. Tomorrow they would be
going on a magical journey.
Everyone was up early the following morning – the forecast said there’d be rain in the afternoon, so it
was important to get the good bit of the day. The children squeezed into the car. There were no
rear seatbelts but luckily families were larger, so there were enough children to provide quite a tight
wedge of child in the back seat that did much the same job as a seatbelt. The combination of tight
squeeze, sticky heat and short trousers meant that when the family reached the destination, the
children exited the back seat with a series of pleasing shlump sounds as they peeled themselves off
the leatherette.
That was if the car made it to the seaside. Mammies had to be highly skilled in expectation
management, because there was always a risk the car would break down. Once the car had slid to an
anti-climactic halt miles from the sea and Himself had gone to look for a phonebox, someone had to
stay behind and break the news.
The seaside of the past was a different seaside to now. There were no kitesurfers with their ruddy
good health and optimism to make you feel guilty for not ‘living life to the max’, no farmers’ markets
to intercept you with crackers and dips and anti-oxidants. It was a democratic place where all were
equal in the eyes of the sun.
Irish Mammy took up position, digging into a beach head and minding everything while she read The
Lilac Bus, one eye scanning the horizon. And then suddenly she decided to take the plunge! An
Institution was now wearing a swimming costume and being... giddy. This was a moment to
remember.
One thing that is sadly in decline now is the classic photo of the Irish Mammy. It was one of the
family, taken by Himself, standing 50 yards away with a camera that looked like it shouldn’t work at
all. Mammy would protest severely that she hated having her photo taken, and would hide behind a
clutch of children. But these snaps are real. They are somewhere in a box. All the closed eyes and
missing heads and feet, all the blurry, shaky, squinty sun ones, all the self-timer ones where nobody
knows when the timer is going to go off. These photos are no more now. There has been a huge
explosion of narcissism in this country, sparked by Facebook, camera phones and an improvement in
general skin quality caused by the introduction of smoothies.
Adapted from Isn’t it well for ye? The Book of Irish Mammies, by Colm O’Regan,
Transworld Ireland , 2012.
Passage C
The Miller brothers looked more like prospectors than paleobotanists. Their beards were caked with
dirt; goggles kept their eyes from being sandblasted by the desert winds. Both were big men, more
than six feet three, and on a knife-edged ridge in southern Utah they moved with the quiet confidence
of outdoorsmen. As Ian swung a pickax into the mudstone, Dane attempted to roll a cigarette
between gusts. Loose tobacco flew from the paper. “Doggone it,” he said, and tried again.
Along with Scott Sampson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and Joe
Sertich, the museum’s dinosaur paleontologist, the brothers were prospecting for fossils in the
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Within that largely roadless wilderness they were
exploring a particularly remote area, a maze of steep bluffs and gullies north of Horse Mountain.
While the rest of their team was a few miles away, working fossil quarries discovered in previous
years, Sampson, Sertich and the Millers were looking for new ones. After months of office duty at
the museum, Sampson could barely contain his joy at being “where no paleontologist has ever been
before”– with the prospect of discovering new treasure from the “lost continent” of Laramidia.
Working mainly in the Kaiparowits formation, a 2,600-foot-thick deposit dating from 77 million to
75 million years ago, they’d unearthed fossils of thousands of plants and animals, from conifer cones
to crocodiles, turtles, and dinosaurs – especially dinosaurs. During the 20 million years or so that it
existed, Laramidia seems to have been a runaway dinosaur factory, cranking out large and small
dinosaurs in a surprising diversity of species.
“This place is littered with bones,” Sampson said, as his boots crunched up a slope not far from
where the Miller brothers were working. “I’ve got pieces of a turtle going up this hill, but I have no
idea where the rest of this thing is.” He picked up a small beige object and licked it to see if it was
porous bone or boring rock. “If it’s bone, it will stick to your tongue,” he said. “If it’s rock, it
won’t. This one stuck.
Fossil-hunting has always been stubbornly low-tech. When it comes to field work, not much has
changed since the great “bone-rush” of the 19th century, when discoveries in the Wild West sparked a
furious campaign to get fossils out of the ground and into the great halls of East Coast museums.
While the U.S. Army was chasing Sitting Bull across the northern plains, teams of scholars,
wranglers and ruffians were pulling giant leg bones from the badlands, wielding the same picks,
shovels, and plaster employed by paleontologists today.
Adapted from Digging Utah’s Dinosaurs, by Peter Miller, National Geographic, May 2014.
Passage D
The Bake Off Tent – covered in bunting, white picket fenced-off from reality – was a bizarre, dreamlike
space in which to bake. China cups hung neatly on the walls, huge mixers sat proudly on each
bench on the scrubbed wooden work surface.
On a good day, the sun would bathe the tent with a warm glow and we’d pause for a second, hands
plunged deep into our mixing bowls, to gaze out at a field of buttercups. Amid the gleaming pans
and polished chrome, it was easy to lose sight of just how rarefied this environment was.
However, at the end of each week of filming, dizzy on a mix of adrenaline, sugar and pure relief at
having survived the week, I’d return to a very different world: a student kitchen so small that I
couldn’t stretch out my arms or find space to store all the ingredients and equipment I needed. Oh,
and I’m sure we had mice – or worse – at one point.
But still I baked and baked and baked. I set up a long table in my room, one high enough that I
could stand at it to knead dough or to whisk meringue. I lined my bookshelves with packets of flour
and sugar, stacks of chocolate and jars of spice. Baking tins filled my cupboards, cookie cutters were
crammed into a drawer, and clothes were pushed aside to make room for a box full of bottles of
essence and colouring. This was less student flat, more alchemist’s den.
Ideally we’d all have the money for organic stoneground flour, Continental-style unsalted butter, a
selection of proving baskets and a top-of-the-range mixer with more horsepower than a small car.
But, if I could bake in that squalid, cramped flat, and on a student budget, then anyone can!
During my time preparing for Bake Off, I bought the cheapest flour and butter, swapped expensive
fresh fruit for frozen alternatives and experimented with ways to draw more flavour out of cheap
ingredients. But baking on a budget isn’t just about knowing where to cut corners – it’s also a case of
learning what’s worth investing in. My kitchen had an oven so old that the numbers on the
temperature dial had worn away. It was consistently inconsistent, too-fiercely hot at the top and far
cooler at the bottom.
Waiting to see whether your bake will emerge from the oven scorched or raw is not the sort of
cliffhanger that anyone should have to endure – which is why the baking purchase I recommend most
is an oven thermometer. It will quickly become your new best friend and, at around £5, it’s a lot
cheaper than shelling out for a new oven.
Adapted from “How I did Bake Off on a budget”, Ruby Tandoh, BBC Good Food, 2014.
Passage E
The tiny little meadow by the house had been cut and the hay lay crisping in swathes in the sun: the
wild flowers dabbling colour in every part. There were the midnight blues of the vetch, the yellows
of trefoil, the splendid reds of the clover. It was the loveliest thing to be out in the field turning the
hay with the pike, my two black dogs taking comfort in the shade of the alders a while, the sweetness
of the mowers wafted near and far.
The swallows meanwhile were sweeping in and out of the shed, busy as they were with the rearing of
their young. It was as if they too were revelling in the light, the warmth of the sun lying gentle on
their backs. The yellow lilies blooming in old clay pots across the yard: the blue of the swallows the
perfect foil for the yellow of the flowers.
The young had already left the nest and were perched on the cross beams in the shed, the first little
bird coming out into the sun for the very first time that morning: the lilies beneath him shining with
dews. The Persian cat, weary of the heat, had found a haven of her own underneath the shrubs and
left the swallows to their own devices.
Sometimes she liked to curl up among the red geraniums, but the sun was too hot for that, the shade
and the shadow of the shrubs more pleasing to her then. The red clover lay in rich red pools of its
own, crisping and drying still, everything about it like an echo of the summers of old.
I was always on the lookout for butterflies and bees, but the frogs were my favourite of all: the touch
of their skin wonderfully damp and chill in the heat of the afternoon. The frogs were the talisman of
summer, the touchstone of the season that brought it to life in a moment. Summer would not have
been summer without them, so that I sat caressing them in my hands, sprays of wild rose and
woodbine cascading around me.
They say that when we are at our happiest we are least aware of it. This may be true, but even then I
think I knew how lucky I was just to be with the frogs and the flowers in the long grass.
As I turned the hay in the field, the swallows still swept over the lilies and the sapling apple trees. I
thought of days spent helping in the fields of the nearby country estate: Mrs Ruth coming with homemade
apple juice, carried in stone cold jars, in her basket, her three Irish terriers tripping at her heels.
The taste of the apple juice was wonderfully cold and sweet in the heat of the afternoon. It was like
the taste of nectar itself, the very epitome of all the delights of summer when the world was green and
young: the Kerry cows grazing in their pastures overlooking the bay.
Adapted from Lilies and Swallows by Patrick O’Sullivan, Ireland’s Own, July 2014
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