New Warriors on Display at Northwestern Middle School

Inspired by a field trip to Houston Museum of Natural Science Terra Cotta Warrior Exhibit, Northwestern Middle Talented Arts students have produced some amazing artwork currently on display in the school’s library.

The Terra Cotta Warriors of Emperor Qin are a cultural treasure of China. They are the recently dug up remains of the Terra Cotta Army that Emperor Qin constructed for his afterlife. They were buried for hundreds of years before being discovered by well diggers in 1974 in Xi’ai Shaanxi Provence China.

Northwestern Middle School Talented Arts students, along with Tammy Wood, Margret Atkinson and Talented Arts Teacher Shawn Quincy Foreman traveled to Houston to see the Terra Cotta Warriors from China.

Foreman describes the exhibition as “amazing; just being in the presence of the works of art was truly a once in a lifetime experience. The students had a wealth of information passed on to them by the docents; they were shown how the warriors were constructed as well as the reasoned for them being built,” he explained.

Upon returning their first assignment this year was to construct a three dimensional Asian type warrior figure with armor. The purpose of the trip was to get an idea of how a figure could be constructed three dimensionally and what Asian motifs may have been like during the Qin dynasty. The students worked long and hard on constructing these new warriors. They used a construction technique called tape casting. This is where they covered a body part with plastic wrap, and then taped over it in several layers. They then cut it off and reassembled the pieces into a figure and painted it.

The Talented Art students jumped in with both feet and produced some amazing pieces of work. The New Warriors will be on display at the Northwestern Middle School library until the Christmas Break.