learning line with rodney.

My official art rotations have begun and this week the 1st and 4th graders are exploring line in their lessons. The 4ths are doing a project that is inspired by the abstractions of Rodney Alan Greenblat. Rodney has been making illustrations, paintings, and designs for a good while now. He actually designed the cover for the first They Might Be Giants album back in 1986 (not that this matters to the kids, but I loved that album... and Lincoln after that one:). His style ranges from figurative to non-objective abstract, but it all has a good degree of funk in it. It is his more abstract work that I am focusing on with the kids.

When I share a few of Rodney's pieces with my classes, we talk about how he uses contour lines to define most of the shapes in them. We then look at how he uses different thickness of line to create contrast. Certain shapes stand out because their outlines are more bold than others.

We also talk about how his work and abstraction in general, allows people to see different things in an image. I like this because it breaks down the stress involved for students in the project, especially for their first drawing of the year. They can include the shapes they want and if they don't draw them perfectly, the image can still work... as long as their shapes and arrangement of those shapes is interesting.

I've been sharing this quote from Rodney's website about abstraction-
"Stop making sense. When you have abstract paintings in your house, you can read a language without words. You can see forms that have are non-representational. You can enjoy freedom from meaning. You can appreciate line and color for what they are. You can make up your own associations and stories about the works if you want. You can easily ignore them. You can easily enjoy them. Your guests will be impressed, and might imagine you know something about art. If you want, you can say they are influenced by Kandinsky and Calder, or you can say they remind you of a child’s birthday party. Either one is Ok. They are abstract."

For this project, students create 2 small sketches before moving on to their final drawing. Each of these must include a minimum of 3 main shapes, a minimum of 7 supporting shapes, and a use of line or shape to make a minimum of 2 patterns. When doing this I emphasize that the types of shapes and placement of them is up to the students. I don't want copies of Rodney's work. We are using his work as a springboard for their own investigations of line, shape, and abstraction.

 Pulling focus words from the word wall.

Breaking things down.

When their sketches are done, the kids are sharing with a neighbor why they are picking one over the other. Then they draw the chosen design on a larger sheet of paper.

Then comes the contrast part of the project. Students need to trace most of their pencil lines with a thin sharpie and they go over a 2-3 of those with a thick sharpie. This way they have 3 different thicknesses of line in their final drawing.

They can color the shapes in their final drawing any way they see fit, as long as they leave the background white, so that they contrast against each other.

Most kids have finished, but we haven't had enough time for their written reflections. Next class, they will come back and identify how they made shapes contrast from each other and identify what the most successful part of their project is and why.

a marz landing.

Marz Jr. that is:)

Marz Jr. is a New York based artist who focuses on cityscapes, comic books, and movies as the subjects for his artwork. The way he handles his subject matter was a perfect fit for the 4th graders' continued work with line and contrast.

Before starting the project we reviewed how we made contrast and emphasis in the Petra Borner inspired project from last week. I pointed out that with that project we focused more on imagination and this week we would focus more on observation. Students read aloud from my Standards board- today I am..., so that I can..., and I'll know I've got it when...

Then I shared Marz Jr.'s work with them.
The kids loved looking at his work, especially the Star Wars imagery. What they noticed right away about most of his work was that the emphasized objects stood out because they were lighter in color value than everything else in the image.

For our lesson, we focused on his cityscapes. We talked about what makes a cityscape a cityscape and then looked at numerous buildings from San Diego. As we looked at these, I showed students how to make building shapes look 3d with diagonal or curved lines.

Students followed along using their dry erase boards to do sketches on. This was the first time we tried these out to practice, and I think they worked really well. I'm looking forward to using these for brainstorming and sketching throughout the year.

After practicing, students were expected to draw at least 3 buildings in their final project. At least 2 of them needed to be from our San Diego examples. They could invent or borrow buildings from other places for other buildings if they wanted to.

Students drew their buildings on a colored square and then drew their final building on a white piece of paper that was cut and glued in place to create the focal point of their drawing.

Thanks also goes to Patty at Deep Space Sparkle for doing a project based on Marz Jr.'s work last year. The step by step I used is how she broke it down. I just added the hometown San Diego focus to the project:)

down with pattern.

Looking down, that is.

The 4th grade students and I focused on line and pattern for their first full lesson this year. This summer I pinned a textile design by Marimekko, the super fine Finnish design company. It had an interesting play between mostly line patterns with a few 3d looking ones due to the use of diagonal lines in those particular sections.

I later found out that  the designer of that particular pattern was Maija Louekari. Her website provides a visual portfolio of her work. Very graphic and bold. She uses line a lot throughout her designs as well. I really appreciate the hand drawn feel of her work.

The design provided an interesting investigation of pattern and contrast for my students. It also gave me an opportunity to talk about what a textile designer does for a living. They enhance our daily lives by providing us with colors, patterns, and images on things that would be pretty plain without them. Things like walls, dresses, sheets, pillows, plates, bowls, and many more are made more interesting by designers all over the world.

After showing students some of Maija's other work we looked at the above images. I had students identify the different types of lines present- straight, bent, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, thick, and thin. Students quickly picked up on the rows that popped out due to the diagonals. They read these parts like corners of buildings. I asked them to squint their eyes and tell me if any of the sections stood out from the rest. The thick, bold patterns stood out to them because they contrasted against most of the other areas due to value and size.

I then shared with them that the design is based on an aerial view of an urban landscape. (I found this bit of info out from john lewis, here.) I then asked what those corner patterns could be and got the roofs of homes back in return. We then identified what could be sidewalks, alleys, crosswalks, streets, and yards. 

This was cool because it took something that was abstract and made it more real for the students. They could relate to the design and project better.

We ended up modifying our takes on Maija's design a bit. I showed the students examples I had done and asked them what was different about my versions and the originals. In a few I had selected certain rows and colored them with one or two colors. I emphasized that this made those parts stand out because they were the only parts of the design in color. In others I had broken from the using just straight lines. I included patterns based on curves, waves, and spirals, so that these patterns could imply gardens, lawns, or trees.

When it got down to making our designs I demonstrated how to hold the a ruler in the middle and not at just one end or another, so the ruler was more stable. Students added anywhere between 6 to 9 vertical lines, spacing them differently so the rectangles they made could represent different parts of the urban landscape. The corners (rooftop peaks) came next. Once those were done we added different patterns using thin, regular, and wide tip sharpies. I demonstrated how they could create different value patterns by using these markers in a variety of ways. When the roofs were done, the other rectangles could be patterned.

The final step was to add a maximum of 3 rows of color if they wanted to. There were a number of students who kept their designs black and white.

It would be interesting to see what some of these looked like as a big wallpaper design. Hmmm...

Great job kids!

a whale's tale.

A series of links from one art blog to another led me to the image by CSA  Design that you see below.

My first reaction (to self)- love this!

second reaction (to self)- 2nd grade line project!

It is such a great image. Cheerful and innocent. Rich with line and shape teaching points for my students.

Many of the images that the CSA Design firm has created (and they have made many, many of them) since 1989 have similar characteristics. Not necessarily cheerful and innocent, but rich in teaching possibilities and just very well put together. Very smart sense of composition and design. 

The students and I checked out a number of images from the company website and talked about the use of contour lines to create a variety of natural shapes. We touched upon the balance between positive and negative shapes (character and background). We also spent a few minutes talking about why the whale stood out from the background. A triple answer the class soon found out- due to its size contrast, its color contrast, and that it's right in the middle of the paper!

When we got to the hands on part of the lesson, the construction of the whale was done through direct instruction, but the whale patterning and background underwater elements were up to the students.

CSA used silver ink along with brown to stress the importance of the color of the paper in creating a striking image, but we went with white because I don't want all my silver sharpies to dry out so fast:)

The kids really enjoyed creating their own whale designs. They had a chance to incorporate a wide variety of underwater elements. The smart design of the original image really provided a great template for students to visually succeed with.