Install week

TIme to turn our ideas into reality. Russell Jenkins, temporary exhibition technician, did a brilliant job of translating our ideas into something that worked! We then got the chance to help install it all in the learning space.

Here it is all taking shape.

Trying out ideas, St Anne and anatomy

Our final two ideas involved Leonardo's drawing of St Anne and his interest in anatomy.

For St Anne we liked her expression and wanted to see if we could capture it. We used pieces of fabric to recreate her outfit and then had a go at copying her expression. We liked the idea that people could either draw or photograph their "St Anne's" and potentially share them with us on social media.

Trying out ideas, Deluge

Next up was the drawing 'a deluge' an expressive drawing of a storm done in Leonardo's later life. We were all drawn to the feeling of movement and emotion in it and wanted to reflect that in our activity.

We came up with the idea of making a sensory space with hanging clouds, projections and sound.

After lots of reworking we decided to create a series of hanging clouds that could be projected on to using an old school Over head projector ( we toyed with the idea of projection mapping but felt it was too complicated for a self led space).

I had fun viewing a selection of very old OHP' s to use and then we started playing ...

We started by making clouds using some recycled light shades left over from an exhibition we curated and designed a few years back and a lot of pillow fillings.

Trying out ideas, Kinetic sculptures

We now needed to plan how each idea would actually work.

We liked the drawing da Vinci had done of the River Arno, east of Florence. Leonardo came up with a plan to divert the Arno away from the besieged Pisa, so cutting off its supplies from the sea. Leonardo also drew maps of the river to show the water flow. We started by thinking about diverting water, unfortunately original ideas of having water in the museum weren't going to work  so we came up with the idea of making a marble run which visitors could build them selves with a ping pong ball taking on the role of the water flow.

Of course that meant we needed to try the idea for ourselves!

Planning the Learning space

The time had come to start thinking about how we might want our creative learning space to look.

We stared by choosing our five favourite drawings from the Leonardo exhibition and talking about what it was about them we liked as well as some of the skills, techniques and ideas we felt they conveyed.

We used these to brain storm lots of different creative ideas for the project space.

Researching Leonardo: Drawing cats at the Kitty cat cafe

Inspired by one of the ten drawings in the upcoming Leonardo Exhibition we decided we should have a go at drawing cats.

 Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015 in print and online.

Researching Leonardo: Inventing

Next up we tried our hands at some inventing. We tried to make the tallest tower we could out of post it notes, which was harder than expected. 

Researching Leonardo : Maths games

For the last month we have been finding out more about Leonardo da Vinci, his life and work in preparation for creating an interactive learning space inspired by him and by ten of his drawings that will be showing at Nottingham Castle Museums and Gallery this summer.

Leonardo at Light Night

Illuminate members have been busy working away on a Light Installation for this year’s Light Night.

We have been inspired by the exhibition of drawings by Leonard da Vinci which will be showing at the Castle later this year. Finding out about the life and work of Leonardo made us want to explore our own inventiveness.

We particularly liked Leonardo’s inventions and ideas for flying machines and so started by looking at insects, butterflies wings and flying machines from our Access Artefact collection to come up with ideas of what we might create.