dcf.cymru stimulus sheet · Art · Year 11
Nia, her school, her work and all the comments on this sheet are invented for practice. Ernest Zobole is a real Welsh painter. This is not a real portfolio or Externally Set Assignment.
Nia, a Year 11 pupil, did a practice project on cynefin, one of the example big ideas in the WJEC specification. Cynefin is a Welsh word for the place where you feel you belong: your habitat, your patch. She is presenting her work as a digital presentation: 6 slides, each 1920 by 1080 pixels, to be viewed on screen by her teacher and, in a real portfolio, by a moderator who has never met her.
Nia’s intention, from her notebook: “To show my town from the mountain road above it, the place I always come back to. I want the rows of houses to look like they are holding on to the sides of the valley.”
Nothing about her intention appears on any of the slides.
Each slide is drawn below, with a note of exactly what is on it.
The words “My Project” in pale yellow, in a decorative handwriting font, on a white background. Nia’s name and class, very small and pale grey, bottom right. No big idea, no intention.
Left: an image of a painting by Ernest Zobole, file name zobole.jpg. No title, date, medium or source is given. It looks blocky when the slide is shown on the classroom board. Right: four paragraphs about Zobole’s life at 9 point, pasted from a website with no source given. It begins: “Ernest Zobole (1927 to 1999) was a Welsh painter, born in Ystrad in the Rhondda to Italian parents, known for paintings of the Rhondda valleys…”. There is nothing about what Nia sees in the painting, or how it links to her own work.
14 photographs of the town taken from the mountain road, all the same size, in two rows of seven. No captions, no dates, and nothing to show which photographs Nia used or why. Photograph 9 is squashed, so the houses look flattened.
Three digital edits of her best photograph: a panorama stitched from 5 photographs; a blue colour overlay; a mirror filter that reflects the valley sides so they meet in the middle. The only annotation: “I did a filter on these. It looks cool. The blue one is my favourite.”
A scanned 4B pencil drawing of the terraces, placed on the slide sideways. The annotation reads: “I drew the terraces from the mountain road in 4B pencil, pressing harder for the nearest rows so they come forward. The lines of houses follow the curve of the valley, like the streets in Zobole’s paintings. The bottom half works. The sky is empty and flat, so next I will try adding the texture of the mountain with charcoal.”
A phone photograph of Nia’s acrylic painting of the town, taken at an angle, with glare from a window across the top third. The heading is “Final piece!!”. No title, media, size or evaluation. The photograph was sent through a messaging app, which made the file smaller.
Every slide is 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high. When a picture is shown on a slide larger than its file, the software has to invent pixels, and it looks blurred or blocky. When the width and height are changed by different amounts, the picture is distorted.
| Image | What it is | File size (pixels, width by height) | Size shown on the slide (pixels, width by height) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Slide 2: the Zobole painting | 300 by 225 | 1200 by 900 |
| 2 | Slide 3: photograph 9 | 4000 by 3000 | 240 by 150 |
| 3 | Slide 5: the scanned drawing | 1240 by 1754 | 540 by 764 |
| 4 | Slide 6: the final piece | 640 by 480 | 1440 by 1080 |
The other 13 photographs on slide 3 are 4000 by 3000 pixels, shown at 240 by 180.
| From | Comment |
|---|---|
| Her teacher (general advice) | “Your practical work has come on well, especially the drawing on slide 5. At the moment the presentation hides it. Think about what someone who has never met you sees first on each slide. Annotations should explain your decisions and link to your intention, not just describe.” |
| Ffion, a classmate | “I couldn’t read the title at all. Is it yellow? Also slide 5 is sideways, I had to tilt my head.” |
| Owen, a classmate | “Slide 3 is too busy. Which photo did you actually use? And the painting on slide 2 goes all blocky on the big screen.” |
| Nia, about her own work | “I ran out of time so I just pasted everything in. I think the final piece is my best work but you can’t really see it.” |
From the WJEC GCSE Art and Design specification. Each is worth 25% of the qualification.