In visual arts this term we created a colourful piñata shaped from mythical hybrid animals. We made this piñata for our year 8 transition day to present in front of the parents. We spent several weeks researching, designing and making this project. It was a fun process and the end result ended up being very appealing.

Our piñata project was influenced and based on the works on Roberto Benavidez. Roberto is famous for making colourful piñatas of mythical creatures, which was the base of our project.

Roberto’s piñatas were a combination of two or more animals. We looked at his pinata animals, as well as other mythical creatures of develop our design, and decided on a hybrid of a woodland mouse and a hummingbird. The colour palette had to be colourful in order to stand out, so it was important to choose vibrant colours that match our design. Our creature was a woodland creature, so we decided to include a variety of greens as well as gold and silver. We experimented with other colours but decided on this one as my partner and I thought it fit the best. We originally wanted to have brown in our palette but there was no brown paper so we decided on either gold or copper, which ended up suiting better.

Midway through the project we were met with a time problem. The deadline of the piñata’s was nearing and our artworks weren’t near done yet. To overcome this, we spent other classes working on the piñatas, and people from other classes helped cut paper. This helped us and everyone finish the piñatas on time.

On the day we presented our piñatas on stage, and toured the parents around the school, showing them through all the other projects. The evening went well and we ended it with hanging our piñatas on a line on the common.