Term 3 session 6

Warm up today was drawing the negative shape around a chair. This is a much harder concept than drawing around a single object. The chair has angles, shapes and lines to consider.
I showed the children how to find the angle of a line by holding the pencil at arms length, closing one eye and lining the pencil up with the focus line on the chair. By putting the pencil straight down on the paper without changing the angle it gives a pretty close line.

It is amazing when the children look at and draw the chair they do not get the perspective (all four legs are the same size), but by concentrating on the negative shapes the perspective is naturally drawn.
This photo shows the two modes of drawing by the same child.

Next up we revisited the abstract paintings started last week. The children are drawing birds on the abstract background with indian ink. Today we were looking at different ways to highlight their drawings. Several different examples show the initiative children took.
One: using white crayon very heavily then scratching patterns in it
Two: using different coloured paint for the lines.
Three: blocking in the whole shape with thin white paint and reapplying the indian ink outline..

We have started planning our next composition by using geometric shapes and bird images.
So far the process has been:
draw a variety of bird images on single pieces of paper, vary the size of images
cut the images out
place the cut out birds on A2 paper
form geometric shapes around the bird shapes - birds can extend into another shape
move the images around until a balanced composition is achieved - when correct glue into place
This process completes the plan... next week we will transfer the plan onto heavy paper.