lines! more lines! even more lines!

Wrapping up with my first 2 week rotation with our 1st & 4th graders and we have been experimenting with line while looking at the work of Nate Williams, Brita Lynn, Cadu Mendonca, and Seize Happywalker for inspiration.

Let’s dive in.

1sts looked at an illustration by Nate Williams and created profile portraits than included things of interest/ importance to them. They talked about things they liked, drew a few of them as practice, and then included them in the head of a portrait. They drew a picture of them thinking about what they like. 

They came back this week and we looked at a couple animals at the SD zoo and compared them to a couple paintings by Cadu Mendonca. They picked up on the difference between seeing a face in profile and seeing one from the front- one eye and half a mouth… except for peppa pig! We drew one of his animals together and then kids were to experiment with patterns within the animal. Color was added to specific parts to make certain parts stand out.

4ths looked to a drawing by Brita Lynn Thompson (zenspiredesigns) for a landscape and pattern exercise. They noticed how line was used to make the different landscape elements and how she also used it to fill every area with patterns. They looked at a collection of Sd landmarks and tried out combining different elements from different images. We talked about large v small scale and overlapping to create space, to boot.

Students scaled up in pencil, added colored, traced contour lines, and added patterns. Most kids needed extra time for this activity, so they had a full 80 minute session and then 15 minutes of the next to complete it. 

After that, they took a look at some work by Seize Happywallmaker (how awesome is that name?). They picked up on how he uses lines to create different shapes and how he overlaps to still make some depth in an abstract image. They noticed how symmetry was present in some of his pieces and not in others. I shared a short video of Home working and the kids loved it. It’s always cool to share this type of thing with our kids. I think it’s so important to see, videos or first hand, artists working through the various steps of the design process.

I modeled how they could create a design like Seize by starting with a couple simple shapes, giving them borders, adding another border that branches off, and then supporting shapes. We jumped right in to this. It was more much more spontaneous than the landscape drawing. Students drew, traced their lines, and added color. When coloring, I encouraged them to experiment with hard/soft, color patterns, and leaving some background shapes open, so there were places for us to rest.

To wrap up, the 4ths completed an exit slip that had them comparing and contrasting the focus works and telling me which experience they enjoyed more and why.

The 1sts and 4ths are off to a great start! Can’t wait to see them again when we play with shape!

symmetry, space, and suns

This week is the first time I have seen my 2nd graders in 8 weeks. I decided on using illustrator Nate Williams as the inspiration for these classes. Nate does work that has a humorous childlike feel about it. He uses a lot of hand drawn type and his characters are built with a lot of simple geometric shapes. He keeps his color palette pretty simple- primary colors or monochrome schemes.

Half of the classes did a collage and the other half did a drawing.
The focus of both was recognizing and creating symmetry in art. Before creating with both groups, we looked at Nate's website and discussed his job, his use of color and symmetry in his work.

The collage groups made a sun lion. They used both bi-lateral and radial symmetry in their work.

It was a lot of cutting, pasting, and drawing for an hour. Really less than an hour with the project intro. I wish I had 10 more minutes with each of those classes. I think reducing the scale of the project would help in the future.

I switched it up half way through my classes because of this rushed feeling with the collage. The drawing is based on an outer space scene Nate did. 

Along with focusing on symmetry, these classes also did some color mixing. They used construction paper crayons to make secondary colors by mixing two primary colors. As they were adding elements to their drawings I emphasized that they should use different sizes to create some 3d space. Big in the front and small in the back.

Even though the whole composition is not symmetrical, most of the individual elements are.