tricking them

when i'm studying line with my intermediate drawing and painting students one thing i really like to emphasize is the ability we have as artists to communicate the "character" of an object... through our choice of materials and through how we vary the use of those materials to make different kinds of lines. 

usually, after a day of experimenting, i set up an arrangement of stools and chairs, all with very different characters, and i ask the students to draw them, keeping these characters in mind. last year, my students were so "into" this that they begged for a second day to work on their drawings and the results were beautiful. i can already tell that this group is wired very differently and so i will need to adjust many of my projects. there aren't as many students with natural drawing ability as there were last year and, in general, their attention spans are shorter. 

i wasn't willing to ditch the whole assignment, but i knew that if i asked them to draw a bunch of chairs for two hours they would revolt. so...i put the chairs and stools out in a line across one end of the room. i asked them to think of the chairs and stools as they would people, each with a different personality and look. their goal was to make a portrait of each chair.

i had pre-cut pieces of paper for each chair with the idea that if they filled up the whole page the proportion of one chair to another should be correct. they could use any of the materials on the table (ink, charcoal, pencil, sharpie, charcoal pencil, etc.) and use their inherent qualities to further express the character of each chair.

they dove right in without hesitation. they were able to focus on one thing at a time and they seemed to welcome the choice to start with what felt natural to them...the more challenging chair or the more simple ones. i heard them sharing tips for how to see particular angles or how to use the different materials. they were putting to work the experiments we had done the earlier in the week.

as they drew i had the cut out the shapes so they had a pile of cut out chairs and stools. 

when they came back the next day i had arranged the chairs and stools into a group as i did last year for the whole assignment. i asked them to glue their cut-out chairs and stools together to create the arrangement they observed and to begin to add some value where they saw one chair affecting the light or shadow on another. here are some of the results:

most students had interesting revelations while working on this project. they began to see how observing accurate proportions while they work (not just at the end) is crucial to a drawing making sense. many students also saw after putting all the parts together how they hadn't varied their lines enough to show any difference between the characters of the different chairs. those same students were clearly able to look at the work of their classmates and recognize how using different materials or varying their use of those materials made one chair look heavier or slicker or older than the others. 

my hope is that by breaking this drawing down into parts and making it kind of gamey i have begun to build their drawing stamina for later, more intense work.