Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Four Charcoal Shadows

Now these student have explored markers, and basic shapes and lines, it’s time for something different so this morning we changed things up a bit. This morning we tried CHARCOAL. With these students, charcoal is a lot of fun but also extra messy. By the end of class, there was not a one student who had probably not smudged their clothes or faces with some mark of the black stuff.

The great thing about charcoal is the smooth lines that it makes on paper, how it can be smudged into soft shapes and gradients and that it can be erased (to a degree) with fun kneaded erasers! After a quick duplication drawing warm up and playing with our charcoal to get a bit of a feel for it, we began our lesson.

Today we learned about shading—shading a ball in particular.  Step by step, I took my students through the idea of drawing a circle and how to apply a shadow to one side of it. We also looked at how to add a shadow beside our ball—the shadow that the ball would cast upon the table that it would be sitting on. Playing with erasers and blending stumps, we practiced smudging our charcoal to create soft shadows.

Here was my first simple sample of a sphere:

 

After the students completed their spheres, we went on to explore some other shapes:

Each of the students did a fabulous job of trying these techniques. This is a great age to learn by copying and the class did a very impressive job of duplicating these shapes. Here is what the class came up with:

And a special thanks goes out to my assistant Devon today who took over the class for a few minutes and showed the students how to draw this sphere:

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!