Drawing with Simple Shapes

The new school year has started! I know it's early. At ASA we are year round so we all started up again on Monday. This trimester I get to focus on working with the littles. I'll be spending a good chunk of my day with Kindergarten and First Grade. 

I wanted to spend the first week seeing where the student's drawing skills were. I asked the students to draw any type of person they liked and these are some of their creations. Many of them declared that they were done in less than 5 min so working on developing stamina will definitely be one of our goals. 

Most of the students were creating either tadpoles or stick people. So next I worked on encouraging them to use basic shapes. We talked about drawing shapes for a bit. Students brainstormed how many different shapes they could draw, e.g., big circles, little dots, long rectangles, short rectangles, upside down triangles, diamonds, etc. Then I showed them how to put them together to make people.

As you can see, they got a lot more detailed. Next we practiced using simple shapes to show animals.

 I'm about 8 months pregnant right now so depicting babies inside mothers is getting to be a common theme in some of the student's artwork.

Finally we practiced differentiating different animals. I challenged the students to see how many different animals they could draw.

These pictures show specific students work on Monday and on Thursday. You can see how much more complex the student's work is from the beginning and end of the unit. 

Here are W's pictures:

M's pictures.

Cubist Portraits

Here are examples of our abstract portraits. During my lesson, I talked about how european artists first got the idea to start painting in ways that were not realistic. At first some of them (Fauve and German Expressionist if anyone wants to look it up) did this by painting realistically but with crazy wacky colors. We looked at pictures of people with green skin and orange hair. Afterwards, other artists (like Picasso) started moving different body parts around. For my example, I asked students to try using experimental colors and then cutting them up. This one was another big hit with students. After focusing so hard on drawing realistically, I think it was really liberating for them.