Draw on This Fall 2010—Day Seven Pencil Mountains

Today we started with one of my favourite, fun warm-up exercises—The Scribble Challenge! This fun activity for all ages that is great for developing our problem solving ability.

We started by using a marker of any colour, and made a large scribble on paper. Next, we filled in the spaces of our scribbles while trying our best to follow these two rules:

1. Use only three colours. 
2. The same colour cannot share a "wall".

Check out the cool results! There was quite the variety of styles!

For today’s class, I offered the students another new material to draw with—pencils… and not just boring HB pencils, but a full array of 2H, HB, 2B, 4B and 6B. These pencils vary in hardness therefore different pencils help to make lighter or darker values. Hard pencils, 2H and HB = light lines. Soft pencils, 2B, 4B and 6B = darker lines (the higher the number, the softer the pencil).

With such an array of pencils, one can use this variety of values to create "atmostpheric" perspective showing how in a landscape, items in the distance and close to the horizon line are lighter than items closer to you and further from the horizon, such as seen in a landscape of mountains.

So, this was our challenge, a mountain range using different values and taking advantage of all of our different pencils creating dark mountains in the front and lighter mountains in the back. Everyone had a bit of a different style. Have a look!—

Draw on That—Day Six Return to Value Mountain

Following our last class where we explored using different tones to create atmospheric perspective in a mountain range and the use of different pencils, today I challenged my students with something similar but with a bit more detail.

It was kind of like a “colour by number” but more of a… “value by number”. There were seven values to be used, one through seven represented light to dark. Step by step I asked them to use a different numbered value to create each aspect of this scene—

We started with number one and two values to create sky and water then used darker values to create the different mountains, shadows and our tree. I am really impressed by the level of effort so many students put into these drawings and their willingness to try different types of pencil strokes to create these values. I love a brave artist! Check out some of the great work below.

For a fun final project, I wanted show some of the fun we can have with our softer pencils, values and a trick with erasers. The funny thing is, this proved harder than I thought! Although I loved my fun sample that I created the day before, I found it hard to duplicate my process during class! This is my sample—

To create these fun bugs, I used heavy, dark, soft pencil to create simple bug shapes. Using an eraser and a fast back and forth motion, I create “smudge bugs”. The heavy pencil can seem almost slippery and is pulled and pushed by the eraser. The final effect is something like bugs behind a spider web or drawn on an old crumpled paper.

I’m not completely clear on why I had a hard time duplicating my bugs the next day, but obviously the technique takes some practice and experimentation and I encourage my students to have fun trying it out for themselves. They must have liked it as some have asked to try again another day. Here are some samples of today’s student work—

Draw on That—Day Four Pencils and Mountains

Speaking of perspective, for our older kids today, we tried some new things too. Like my younger class today, we had some fun time exploring some simple ways to create a sense of depth in a picture or "perspective". Together we did the meatball drawings to allow us to discuss use of overlapping and size to create depth.

After the meatballs drawn with markers, I brought out something new—pencils... and not just boring HB pencils, but a full array of 2H, HB, 2B, 4B and 6B. These pencils vary in hardness therefore different pencils help to make lighter or darker values. Hard pencils, 2H and HB = light lines. Soft pencils, 2B, 4B and 6B = darker lines (the higher the number, the softer the pencil).

With such an array of pencils, one can use this variety of values to create "atmostpheric" perspective showing how in a landscape, items in the distance and close to the horizon line are lighter than items closer to you and further from the horizon, such as seen in a landscape of mountains.

So, this was our challenge, a mountain range using different values and taking advantage of all of our different pencils. Everyone had a bit of a different style. Have a look!—

Draw on This—Day Four Meatball Perspective

Today's lesson was all about meatballs. ... okay, honestly... I didn't mean for it to be about meatballs, it just kind of happened that way. After some fun warm up drawing, today we pulled out our markers and paper and talked about PERSPECTIVE.

Since last week we created lovely round faces, this week we used similar faces to learn something new. Using overlapping and different sizes, we created a lovely scene of squiggly round faces. We placed large ones in front that overlapped over smaller ones behind and the smaller the face, the further away the face was in the picture, therefore creating that feeling of perspective. Because of our squiggly shapes, it was easy to see how these faces could easily be seen as happy meatball people.

This project also created lots of fun as we got to use different shapes and lines to create all different kinds of eyes and mouths. Check out the creativity!—