Draw on This—Day Eight: Tracing Lizards

Today was all about TRACING. Tracing is such a valuable tool! I have heard many artists refer to tracing as "cheating" but I don't buy that for a second. Tracing an image can help us create muscle memory, to practice new and intricate lines and forms that we might never have drawn freehand and to train ourselves to "draw what we see and not what we think we see". It  It can also create the foundation for a drawing to allow us to focus more on details like shading and texture.

For today's lesson, I used the beautiful, large windows that we have at our location. For each student, I taped up a printed photo of a toy lizard. Over each photo, I taped a clean white sheet of paper. I drew the blinds in order to hide the windows. After all of the students had arrived, I slowly explained what we would be doing that day and pulled back the blinds to reveal where we would be working today.

Each student had the chance to trace two different lizards. One was a top view of the lizard and the second was side view. The fun twist on this exercise was that the second photo was traced with it turned upside down. Each child got the chance to experience how by turning your reference material (the lizard photo in this case) upside down, you are forced to pay closer attention and it is less difficult to be influenced by what you "think you see" as the object is so much less familiar, and you get a better result. I did not discuss this in detail with this very young class but it was a fun question—"Was it easier to trace the lizard right side  up or upside down?"

After tracing, it was detail time! All colours of marker were now pulled out and the children were set free to decorate as they saw fit. There was quite the array of ideas here! Different textures, colour combinations, settings that the lizard was put into, even some attempts at shading. Check it out:

For the children who finished quickly, a new challenge was offered… can you draw the lizard from a real model, without tracing and without a picture? The lizard toy was placed at the front of the classroom as our model and a few students jumped at the challenge. Because the students had just traced the outline of the lizard in photograph, this would help them in their new attempt to draw from a real model. See the wonderful results!—