YOUNGSTERS at a York primary school got creative when they worked collaboratively with an artist to design and make their own group artwork, inspired by their topic, natural disasters.

Over the course of a few weeks, year 5 and 6 pupils from classes 8 and 9 at Park Grove Primary Academy worked alongside Bobbi Gastall, an illustrator and artist, originally from Strensall, to develop their ideas.

The project started by the children exploring the visual language related to different natural disasters, exploring the symbols, colours or textures inspired from that particular disaster.

The children worked in groups to then develop this visual language into different compositions, combining a range of elements to represent natural disasters as a whole. Each group developed an idea which would then be incorporated into the final design, which became an interactive sculptural mural.

Once the design was finalised and the mural boards cut into shape, all 60 children were given specific tasks so they could work collaboratively to create the artwork from the proposed plans. These involved drawing the design onto the boards, mixing the range of paint colours, painting onto the boards, adding specific details and then finishing the edges.

Explaining the colours, abstract shapes and visual language used for the artwork, year 6 children Katarina and Annabelle said: "The colours all clash but also compliment each other to symbolise and and represent the range of natural disasters. The red is like a volcano, the blue is like a tsunami, the yellow represents drought and orange is fire. There are some waves, some jigsaws, some umbrellas and other abstract shapes which link to natural disasters. We used jigsaw pieces to symbolise how natural disasters are interlinked, for example, an earthquake may cause an avalanche."

The children also designed the physical composition, and how it would sit in the school grounds to enable other members of Park Grove to interact with it.