(Group A) During this session we were lucky enough to welcome a special guest: Cato, the sweet dachshund belonging to one of our neighbours. We invited Cato along to be our model and, of course, so we could cuddle her! We talked about dogs (and especially dachshunds) in art. We looked at portraits of dogs by three famous artists, all of whom were inseparable from their dachshunds: P. Picasso, A. Warhol and D. Hockney. Then we observed Cato carefully, and started to draw her in pencil. We also used photographs of Cato after she had left. The aim of the exercise was to capture ‘man’s best friend’ realistically, although the children could imagine the situation where the scene is happening. The next step was to paint Cato’s portrait in gouache. David Hockney’s artwork Dog Days served as inspiration for the use of colours (especially pastel yellow, blue and green).
