Arty Afternoons

Come make your very own Christmas wreath with all sorts of fun craft supplies, then take it home to hang up as a brand-new decoration!

Design and make a colourful Christmas tree sculpture inspired by Biddy Picard’s blue, ceramic tree displayed in Gallery 5.

Get inspired by the paintings in our exhibitions and create a beautiful, mixed media landscape artwork. Learn all about perspective and how objects are larger in the foreground and smaller the further away they are in the background.

Create a 3D scene from card showing the view from a Newlyn cottage window.

Make a tiny sketchbook with the Penlee House team. Then explore our wonderful archaeology and social history museum galleries and sketch your favourite artefacts on display.

Get creative by drawing your own portrait on tracing paper, then transfer each facial feature onto colourful card and paper. Finally, cut out and collage your pieces together to make a bright and cheerful portrait masterpiece to take home.

Imagine yourself in the shoes of the people in the portraits and draw yourself into one of the famous Newlyn School paintings.

Try making your own Victorian-style silhouette artwork.

Use different materials to colourise the brilliant photos of local life in West Cornwall in the 1940s and 50s.

Bring history into the present and update the people in the images by dressing them in modern clothes and giving them more modern accessories. You could swap a mirror for a mobile phone or a traditional Victorian outfit for a football kit!

Make a paper chain of all the people you spot and decorate their clothes and special features to show who they are or what they are doing in the pictures.