Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Five More Charcoal Drawings

In honour of Halloween, I offered my students a fun Frankenstein style exercise to warm them up and spark their imaginations. Each student received a piece of paper on which they create a pair of feet. They then passed the paper to another student who added legs onto the feet. The paper was passed again and that student drew on a torso and arms. The paper was passed one last time and the last student drew a head. For these body parts, the students could draw animal parts, robot parts, human parts, monster parts, or whatever their imaginations could conjure up.

This was a great fun experiment with some crazy results. Check out a sample—

After our fun warm up and time to see everyone's monstrous creations, we started today’s lesson that continued our exploration of the use of wonderful, messy charcoal!

Last week, the students learned to draw some simple three dimensional shapes and how to apply shadows with soft, blending charcoal. Today we continued with this lesson and worked on creating cones and cylinders. Once we created these shapes, I challenged the students to create these objects from all of the shapes that we have learned.

For next week, we will look at what we can do with these simple shapes. These great ideas come from the epic Jon Gnagy whose lesson books I read over 30 years ago. These are classics for sure!

These students did a great job and I am very impressed with the results. Check out the subtle details!—

Way to go class!