more sugar!

I was very impressed with the drawings made by the one 1st grade class I had yesterday, but after reflecting on the process I decided to make the drawing a bit easier for the rest of the classes. I found another painting of candy corn by Shawn Kenney.

Shawn's composition viewed the corn from a head on or from the side. It eliminated the need for the many angles that the class used yesterday. The shapes are just softened triangles. Instead of pointed corners, they are rounded.

The rest of the exercise is the same. The use of light and dark to turn a flat shape into something that looks round and 3d. I have done this with 2 classes so far and I think the students are doing a great job. They can focus more on color mixing, overlapping, and the use of light and dark.

candy corn!

Yum.

One of the many reasons I enjoy this season is that I get my yearly fix of of this high fructose treat:)

The artist Margaret Morrison creates photorealistic paintings of many sweet treats. One of the paintings just happened to be a 4' tall candy corn still life. Excuse me while I wipe the drool from my chin.

I shared a number of her paintings with my first graders today. We talked about what a still life is and how Margaret's paintings are examples of the still life subject. Students agreed that these paintings looked real and I pointed out her use of light and dark to create shadows and cast shadows. 

I reminded students that that when they made their Wayne Thiebaud landscapes they pressed hard to soft to create 3d space. Today they had to press hard and soft again in order to make shapes look 3d.

We drew out our images together, talking about overlapping of shapes while we worked. When it came to coloring the drawings, we used crayola colorsticks. We pressed hard for all the yellow parts. We mixed our yellow and red for the orange parts. When we didi that I modeled pressing softly with the red , so that it did not overpower the yellow in the mix.

We then softly added pencil shadows to one side of each of the treats. When we added the cast shadows we pressed harder to make them darker.

The kids did a great job with the project. The perspective of the shapes was a little tricky for some, but many of the drawings looked 3d due to the overlapping and the shading.