making lights and darks with Budi.

This week the kinders are starting their value unit with me. I wanted to do something that had a good bit of repetition in it, so they could have an opportunity to practice making light and dark values over and over again. Next week, we will apply this practice to a different looking project.

I am using an illustration by Budi Satria Kwan as the focus of this lesson. I came across his work on pinterest recently and thought this illustration had the elements I was looking for- repetition of shape and values, simple, and a bit playful for the kinders.

I started the lesson by reviewing the tree collages we did last time that focused on geometric shapes. I explained what value is, and then I shared a short video interview with Budi. 

This personalized Budi and the kids could see that he is a pretty young artist. He does mostly digital illustrations that become posters and t-shirt designs. (I actually a couple of his t-shirts that he designed for Threadless. I didn't realize this until scrolling through his portfolio and watching the interview:)

When we looked at the above illustration, I had students identify what they saw and how one part of each leaf was light and the other part was dark.

Before starting the drawing, I introduced oil pastels to the kids. I described them as softer, messier crayons with really strong colors.

We did the drawing in 4 parts-

1. drew out the plant stems and leaves in pencil

2. pressed hard and soft with oil pastels to make light and dark values

3. added white to a few leaves to see how that can also make colors lighter

4. traced the pencil lines with black to make the colors pop out more against the white background

At the end of the lesson, we wrote out a sentence together about our drawing. Classes have done some different sentences, but all students needed to count their leaves and include that number quantity.

 some students drew A LOT of leaves:)

 some students got a lil' funky with their stem lines:)

FYI- prepare for some chuckles from the kids when you say his name. Anything that sounds even a little bit like "booty" is gonna get some laughs with 5 and 6 year olds:)