Heads

—Lesson Plan—

This is one good way to get students thinking about the head in perspective and how the features wrap around the head. It's a good intro to drawing the head in a variety of positions.

It's pretty self-explanatory. I do a demo to start them. The students simply draw these cartoon-like heads looking in as many different directions, from as many different angles, as they can think of.

The way to start is by drawing latitude and longitude lines on the spheres, as if they were globe maps. Often they get stuck at this point and create incongruous relationships of the vertical and horizontal axes. As they draw each head, they follow the lines by adding mouth and eyes, very simply.

These may come out a little exaggerated, and that's okay. The face is relatively small, and unless it fills the page and feels very close up, the perspective is very often not pronounced. But the features do wrap one way or another, and I often have to point out when the students get the features wrapping the wrong way or not enough in these drawings.

Section painting

—Lesson Plan—

This one is a variation on using a grid to scale up a drawing.

We start with some pictorial sources, like calendar pages, which I cut into perfect squares on the paper cutter. It's important to start with square sources. We then fold those references like a map and cut on the folds to produce a stack of puzzle pieces, more or less.

Then I give the students larger square pieces of paper, which they fold identically (only larger) and cut the same way. The younger students should make less folds and end up with less sections than the older students.

I have the students scramble their reference pieces and stack them face down. One at a time, they draw a piece to copy onto one of their blank pieces of paper, which they set aside to dry. I don't let them assemble the pieces until they are done. I explain to the perfectionists that the point of the project is to force ourselves to work through a process to see how that affects the final art work.

They can try to be as accurate as possible, or they can work more casually. They can even change the colors as they go.

When all the pieces are copied, they assemble the pieces and collage them onto a new piece of paper or board. Because they are unlikely to cut straight lines, and because the pieces get scrambled, the finished pieces will not line up exactly. I tell them this is part of the charm of the art, that there are imperfections that are fun and interesting to look at. We have achieved a particular aesthetic that has to do with things looking hand-made and assembled—pieced together like a quilt. Some would call this a form of Cubism but I would not consider that to be strictly correct.

The examples pictured here had not yet been glued to a substrate. Note how two of the students very intentionally painted quadrants different colors. It reminds me a little of something Warhol might have done.

Pictogram landscape

—Lesson Plan—

I prepare for this lesson by researching pictograms and gathering examples from various cultures. I concentrate on pictograms that represent objects we would find in a landscape: mountains, rivers, fields, clouds, or the sun, for example. I give the students a handout as a reference for them.

The students draw and color patterns of these symbols, each on a different paper. Then, they cut them out and arrange and glue them on a sheet of paper in an abstract landscape.

This project gets them thinking about visual language, abstraction, and composition. The first one below is my demo and the next is a student work.

There are a number of strong attributes we can identify in the student work. First, it is very dynamic. My sample is pretty static. The student turned symbols in a variety of orientations. Secondly, the color is well done—better than mine. This has a split-complementary relationship between the reds and greens. These particular reds and greens have a simultaneous contrast relationship, and we can look at Klee and Delauney to see that theory in their work. Yellow and blue can also sometimes function as complements, so that's another relationship. You can also think of the whole palette as primaries, though it is a cool palette, keyed to blue (every hue has blue in it, even the yellows and reds). Finally, the student uses a similar parallel line patterning in every symbol, and that creates theme and variation throughout. So there's something to talk about here with students at every level of experience.

Texture rubbings and washes

—Lesson Plan—

I like lessons that teach something in addition to the primary goal. Here, the primary goal is to explore texture. Secondarily, the students learn about resists and washes.

My students enjoy this because it's a bit of a scavenger hunt. They get to run around outside and find textures to collage together onto their paper. The process is a simple one of placing the paper on rough surfaces and rubbing the paper with dark crayons. When one of the artists finds a particularly interesting texture, the others ask where it was and run off to get their own impressions.

One of the cool things they learn is how much texture there is in the world. Texture is everywhere and that's why using texture in drawings and paintings makes the images seem more real, even if they are abstract.

Once they fill their papers, the students come back in and wash over the crayon with transparent watercolors. The waxy crayon markings resist the water, creating a nice effect.

Ribbon drawing

—Lesson Plan—

This is a simple lesson. The students arrange a thick ribbon on the table and light it in a pleasing way. When they are done drawing it, they glue it to the paper.

We had red ribbon lying about so we used it, but I think white or grey might look better.

Geometric homes

—Lesson Plan—

I had a college instructor who made us draw solids for an entire year. It was boring. It's a lot more fun to practice drawing and shading shapes when you have a creative goal beyond simply practicing. And I think that students learn differently when they have a more creative application and a more complex problem to solve.

In this lesson, I set a number of different geometric objects on the table and illuminate them with a single light source. In another post, I'll describe how to make these—it's really pretty easy.

I show the students a sample of the assignment: a drawing of a neighborhood, village, or city of geometric houses or buildings. I demonstrate how to draw and shade the objects and add windows and doors. I also instruct them on inventing light and shadow for the doors and windows. The result is an interesting cityscape of unique architecture.

 

Shading and glazing

—Lesson Plan—

The point of this project is to get students to focus on values and modeling instead of worrying about color. Three-dimensionality comes from light and shadow, and this has to do with value, not color. Often the first impulse for a student is to color an object with its local color. By removing color both from the still life and the painting, the student can concentrate on form.

It is amazing how many different fruits and vegetables are yellow. I stop on the way to class at a farm market and pick up a variety of yellow produce. I'll eat it all, or my students can, so I don't mind paying for the supplies, although they are more expensive now that they were when I first started doing this project.

Since everything in the still life is yellow, it is easy to ignore what color there is, and think in terms of shades of grey. Using acrylic, the students paint the still life with a full value range, paying attention to the various types of light and shadow.

We leave it to dry and, at the next class, they paint over all the elements of the still life using transparent colors. They can use any color they want. The still life is no longer on the table, so they have to use their imaginations. They will find that the still life reads well as a display of produce no matter what colors they choose.

Hands

—Lesson Plan—

This exercise gives students a head start drawing their hands. Because they start by tracing their hands, they can focus on details for this project.

It's not easy to trace the hand. We have to teach students how to use the pencil and it may take a few tries. I demonstrate how it is possible to make the tracing too small, too large, and inaccurate.

Once they have the tracing, then they can work on adding shading, fingernails, features of the knuckles, wrinkles, muscle and bone evidence, etc.

Sometimes, the students are impressed by the fact that they are drawing their hand with their other hand and do an MC Escher by drawing the pencil, the paper, and the tabletop.

Notice how the student who drew the watch made it more iconic and less realistic. The challenge is to get them to take note of what they have accomplished with the hand and translate that into other drawings in the future. Anytime the students trace something with tracing paper or use grids to copy, they get a helping hand that doesn't help their progress unless they can conceptualize what they have accomplished.

Marbles

—Lesson Plan—

Scale is one of the principles that artists need to understand. This project asks the student to draw marbles at various sizes, from as small as they already are to larger than life size.

Many students tend to draw an object at its actual size or its sight size. In this exercise, we get comfortable getting larger. I sometimes have to tell the student to draw the marble as big as a baseball. When they enlarge the scale of the marbles, they start to pay more attention to the characteristics of a marble.

When we are done, we can have an interesting discussion about how the marbles read. Are these marbles the same size, but in different spaces? Do the drawings represent marbles of different sizes? Or are the drawings different sizes, but the subjects were all the same size? Making a still life object larger than life size presents challenges to viewers. I could paint grapes five times larger and people will be convinced they are plums. Can we tell these are marbles? Where does it feel like they are in relation to the viewer?

Lifted shapes in fingerpaint

—Lesson Plan—

This is a fun project that teaches the students a process and results in some cool effects. The finished product combines a painterly, organic visual ground with hard-edged, organic shapes that come to the front.

It is important to note that this works great with some finger paints, but other brands don't work at all. We need a finger paint that stays wet for some time.

After I show the students a sample, they cut out shapes for their project. In one of the samples below, a student has used the four shapes from playing cards.

They set those shapes aside. The student uses one of the warm colors of finger paint (or a combination of yellow, red, and orange) to cover an entire piece of paper. Then the student places the shapes down into the finger paint in an arrangement or composition that he or she likes. In the next step, the student finger paints over everything with a cool color (or with a combination of green, blue, and violet). The greater the value difference between the warm and cool colors, the better the effect. Finally, the student carefully lifts off the shapes to reveal the unadulterated warm colors beneath.

Pulling up the shapes can be the hardest part. You will notice little fingernail marks in the pieces below where the student or teacher struggled to grasp the edges of the shapes. If you use the wrong kind of finger paint, the shapes won't peel off.

This one has my signature on it, so it must have been a demo.

Depending upon your choices, the result can be very graphic or very subtle. Look at those zig-zags the student put in.

This student uses analogous and complementary colors. The orange and pink on the left are more subtle than the contrasting violet and pink on the right. That makes for a wonderful effect. On the left, the yellow is separated from the orange and on the right, the blue is separated from the violet, giving us some visual mixing. Note how the student worked back into the piece after lifting the shapes: there is a spiral that cuts through the whole composition. It looks like there may be two layers, and the bottom layer had dried enough not to be impacted by that spiral. Did the student add the pink back on top? It's hard, on these, sometimes, to tell exactly what the student did, which is pretty cool.

This is a really good color combination. You have to be careful what colors you let the students use first and second. Starting with a primary is good if you add a secondary on top, but adding orange to red won't work. Adding orange to yellow might be subtle, too. That's why I suggest going warm to cool. Here, though, blue to violet works really well. You could make some samples of what works and doesn't work.

Colored water still life

—Lesson Plan—

This is easy to set up and a great project. I fill a number of different glass vessels with water and food coloring. Then I arrange them in the middle of the table and put a single light on them. I turn off half of the overhead fluorescents so the students can still see their papers but we can get a good effect in the still life.

The paintings below were done in two stages. The vessels and projected colors were painted on one day. The backgrounds were added on another. The backgrounds are a little incongruous, but that's okay.

The wonder of this project is that there are so many things the students can clearly see to paint, like reflections, shadows, overlapping colors, and colors cast on the tables. They don't have to study the still life too hard to see these things and add them in their paintings.

The paintings below were painted by children ranging somewhere between seven and eleven. I've had students doing work like this at seven and eight. It really is amazing what they can do. We have to be careful not to push them or "trick" them into doing something more adult, but they really do get it. There's not much I can teach an adult that I can't also teach a child.

A good example of something harder for children is the oval opening in these vessels. As an adult, I had to draw, literally, hundreds and hundreds of those to get it. It goes against the physiology of our arms, actually. A child won't likely accomplish really good ovals. But they can understand what they are seeing. And that's incredibly important for so many cognitive processes in life.

The problem with a lot of educators is that they try to get students to learn skills that, in reality, come about through hundreds of hours of practice. What I do, instead, is work on conceptual development that can happen, sometimes, almost instantly.

Look carefully at these and you will see it's the same still life from different points of view. Look how well they got the proportions, shapes, scale, and positions!

Birds big and small, near and far

—Lesson Plan—


In this lesson, I get the students to take an object—in this case, a bird—and repeat variations of the subject in different sizes. The older ones will understand that they've also created some optical distance between the largest and smallest bird.

The first part of the assignment is simple. Draw some birds (they can look at references or use their imagination). Make a big one at the bottom of the page. It can be so big that part of it is cropped off, if they want. Then draw a small bird at the top of the page. I ask them to think about how they want those two birds to line up, because they will be filling in the rest of the paper with birds of various sizes, and we will be connecting those birds with tree branches.

Depending on this class, the birds can go in order from biggest at the bottom to smallest at the top, or the only rule might be to fill the page with about half-a-dozen different sized birds.

After the birds are drawn, I ask them to draw tree branches to connect them. They can make a trunk somewhere—or part of a trunk, cropped—if they want. The challenge is to get them to understand that it will make more sense for the biggest branches to go with the biggest birds and the smallest with the smallest.

A couple samples, done by children. I like how the student on the right added a flying bird. Both students vary the direction the birds face. I am struck, also, by how the students change the direction of their pencil marks to follow the branches.

Faceted gem painting

—Lesson Plan—

This is a great quick project that gets the student thinking about color.

I show them a simple line drawing of a cut gem. No setting, just the stone. We can use just one design like the one here, or let the students come up with additional shapes. They draw their own gem with light lines on thick white paper, drawing the shape by hand, looking at the sample or using their imagination. If they don't like it, they can start over. But the gem doesn't have to be perfect.

The assignment is to come up with different variations on a color. So if the picture is meant to represent a red gem, one facet will be colored the original red. And then the student will color the other facets with mixtures of the original red with white or with a dark color to make tints. Or the student will mix the red with violets and oranges to make analogous colors, or with green to dull and darken the color.

It doesn't matter what facets the student chooses for any of the colors. It will have the appearance of a gem one way or the other. In the process, the student will learn how mixing colors makes for more variety and a more interesting picture. Even with all these variations, the gem will still read as having a particular local color. But the variation in color and value will give the picture dimension. I can talk to them about how the gem looks warm in some areas and cool in others, if that is the case. I can talk about value. I can talk about color schemes.

And very often, each student's gem will look unique, even if we all start with the same design.

In the sample below, the student started with blue construction paper and then worked with a complementary orange for the assignment.

One line landscapes

—Lesson Plan—

I have my students draw a single line across their paper, from one side to the other. Nothing crazy, nothing fancy, just a line from the left to the right, or from the right to the left.

I then tell them "You've made your first landscape."

I ask them why it's a landscape, and they talk about the ground and the sky.

Figure sketching with shapes, solids, and lines

—Lesson Plan—

The point of this exercise is to get students to see the masses in the human body and experience a variety of ways to model the figure.

It is important for us to understand that there is more than one way to indicate mass and anatomy, and that we will probably always use a couple different techniques in a drawing. It is also important that we understand these are conventions, and at a certain point, every artist stops straining the eyes looking for structure and resorts to personal conventions to give life to a drawing.

I usually have a number of references from drawing books to illustrate how to model a figure out of cubes, cylinders, ovoids, flat planes, contours, and continuous line.  Here are a number of drawings that illustrate the techniques. We usually work from a life drawing model, but the students can work from photos and can even trace these methods over the photos. For some of these methods, it is appropriate to add shading.

What color is our building?

—Lesson Plan—

This lesson is designed to get the students thinking about observing their subject more closely. While we are in the classroom, I tell the students we will be going outside to draw the building with colored pencils. I have the students imagine the building and imagine their drawing.

I admit to them that I can't really remember exactly what the building looks like, even though I come here every day. But maybe we can try to remember. What color is the building? If they say "brick" then I ask what color brick is. How many windows are there and what do they look like? What's the roof shaped like? What color is it? What does the sky and grass look like? This is not a test; we are simply imagining something we walk past every day but fail to notice much about.

Abstraction sequence

—Lesson Plan—

Another great lesson that works as easily for children as adults. The examples here are from seven-year-olds.

I give the students this handout, which shows how three different modern artists took a subject and made it simpler, more stylized, and less realistic with each iteration.

I do an example sequence for them, usually asking them to find a reference for me to work from so I can model working completely from scratch like they will be.

Intervals of three

—Lesson Plan—

How many ways can a picture be broken into thirds?

Three is a magic number in art. Threes cause movement yet feel complete, as in a three-part sonata or three-act play or a three-chord song. Twos can be very stable but may have a movement that feels like bouncing back and forth. Threes have a more complete movement.

For adults, I get into geometry and more complex pictures. For the kids, all I have to do is ask them to look for threes and triangles. The fun starts when we examine additional paintings that are not part of my lecture.

In this painting by John William Waterhouse, the single figure takes a triangular pose. Waterhouse gives us a second triad in the post with a pyramid top and a third triad in the three candles. The woman feels static, but the artist did not center her. He creates angles that feel triangular in breaks in the trees and the direction of the stairs. Keep looking and you will find more. The painting is three units tall and four units wide--a ratio that includes the number three and is a perfect fourth in Western music.

A trapezoid is a square and a square is a trapezoid

—Lesson plan—

I have a nifty trick for helping students see objects in foreshortened perspective.

I draw a square, with blue Sharpie, in the middle of a piece of acrylic. By the way, I have a stack of acrylic rectangles with rounded edges, maybe 12" x 20" or so, that I use for palettes and monoprinting plates. We use them for the ink transfer lessons, too. Anyway, I draw a square on one with blue Sharpie. Then on another, I draw a sideways trapezoid of the same height as the square with a red Sharpie.

One-by-one, I have the students place the two plates on edge on the table in front of them, with the trapezoid perpendicular to their eyes, and the square behind and turned away at an angle, as though the two were covers of an open book.

They can all get to a position (one-at-a-time) where the two shapes become exactly superimposed and turn into one trapezoid.

Once they have seen this, then I can hold up objects in perspective and they get it.

Like most of my lesson plans, this works for kids and adults, but works best for children around nine years or older. I'll introduce perspective to them younger; it's okay if they don't get it right way. This is a great way to introduce the "Coins in space/falling checkers" lesson plan.

Black is white, and white is black

—Lesson Plan—

It is important to really see and understand what is happening with light in order to make realistic pictures.

I used to teach in a basement and we had little windows above our tables. I would take a white and a black piece of construction paper and hold them up to the window side-by-side. When I turned the black so the sun fell directly upon it and I turned the white so that the sun was behind it, the black would become lighter than the white.

This is a great demonstration that teaches the students to match the color and value to what they see, not what they remember or think.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors. —John Ruskin

Tricking the camera

—Lesson Plan—

This is a lesson I use with my photography students. But it is also useful for helping students understand values.

I tell my students that we are going to trick our cameras. We set up a still life with several black objects, several white objects, and several middle grey objects. Here, I have a mug, a spoon, and a piece of fabric in each value.

We set our cameras on auto and shoot all the objects together with the flash turned on and also turned off. Then, we use the manual mode and let the camera meter tell us the exposure to use, without a flash. A tripod may help. In this picture, we have all the objects assembled together and photographed without a flash at the camera's recommended exposure. Everything looks good.

Sticks and stones make green

—Lesson Plan—

I used to teach art to children as young as one. How do I teach art to a one-year-old? Actually, I do it the same way I teach any age. Very often my lesson plans position students—whether one year old or one-hundred-and-one—to make discoveries.This lesson plan is one of those.

I worked with a young art teacher who complained that our hip bosses at the creative preschool gave the kids too much freedom and not enough guidance. "There are rules in art," she said. And that's true. Experiential education still requires teaching. My young colleague wanted to teach the students how to mix secondary colors. Red and blue make violet—that sort of thing.

I said, "watch this lesson." I went outside and gathered driveway gravel, from minute pieces of crushed limestone to small pebbles. I then found a bunch of dead sticks of wood, smaller and larger, but all the right size for a child's hand. I filled empty coffee cans with red, blue, or yellow tempera and mixed in the gravel. I gave each of the children paper and set the tools out for them to create with.

What Do I Know?

Sometimes, my graduate studies in art remind me of a lesson I learned when I was five or six.

I was hanging out with a kid who lived around the corner and a few houses up. I think, maybe, his family had just moved there. I don't remember hanging out with him ever again but on this day we walked along the ditch in the park near our houses. The water was low and pooled in long puddles. All along the way, there were little oil slicks on the surface of the standing water. The rainbow blobs suggested pictures to my neighbor, and as we walked along, he told me that each one was a word and he asked me what word I thought each signified. I would guess, and he would correct me and say that it was something else. I could see the logic as he shared his meanings, though I could never guess the words he had in mind. This interchange went on all through the park. We got to a part further into the park where the water seemed to dry up and there was a last little oil slick that looked like an explosion. I said, "this one means 'boom!'" He considered my interpretation and said, "yeah, that one means 'boom!'"