Twitcher Picture – kids, birds and art at the Castlemaine State Festival
Posted on 2 April, 2015 by Tanya Loos
At Connecting Country, most of our education programs involve adults – so we were delighted to be a supporter of local illustrator/author Trace Balla’s recent activities as part of the 2015 Castlemaine State Festival.
For five days, the Castlemaine Art Gallery was buzzing with round 500 local students from grades 2 to 6. Trace Balla ran a local bird poster-making program, facilitating 20 workshops with around 500 students. She showed them pictures from her illustrated book “Rivertime“, which is about a boy and his bird-watching Uncle’s canoe journey on the Glenelg River – which sparked lively conversations about bird identification and bird behaviour. This was followed by a sketching demonstration by Trace.
Next, the students entered the art-making space, surrounded by bird sounds from a CD of recordings made by Andrew Skeoch and Chris Tzaros from the book “Wildlife of the Box Ironbark Country“. The walls were adorned with bird photographs by Geoff Park. Students chose information sheets from Birdlife Australia and photographs from Geoff Park as inspiration to draw their own stunning bird posters with quirky facts.
“I loved inspiring the local kids to get to know more about their local birds . Hopefully this is just the starting point for many of them to develop a lifelong interest in our beautiful neighbours!” said Trace Balla.
Each student received a copy of the Woodland Birds of Central Victoria brochure, donated by Connecting Country.
This was such a successful project that there is talk that the gallery may continue to use the space as a children’s art space rather than a storeroom. And many students have been spotted drawing birds since!
We also send our congratulations to Trace as her book, “Rivertime” has just been shortlisted for the Readings Children’s Book Prize (click here for further details).
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