Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Farmland landscapes using perspective



I did this lesson with seventh graders, most of who have not learned anything about perspective drawing. This was a wonderful introduction to perspective drawing & landscapes. I would recommend it for 5th-7th grade. We did a 1 point perspective worksheet first. 
The use of soft pastel on colored construction paper is no fail.
I love setting the kids up with a project that is destined to look great. 


Students had to draw a landscape and include crop lines some how.
Tracing in sharpie before applying the pastel was optional. 

These were a few of the examples I showed the kids. If you'd like my entire slide show leave your email in the comments and I'll happily send it along to you.
*** I now have my slide show available via this link. ***




There are so many great Van Gogh examples, you could easily tie it in with a Van Gogh lesson. 

Some more great finished products:











Monday, April 21, 2014

Middle school self-portraits with style

Self-portraits!


These were done by my sixth graders. 
I wanted to squeeze in portraits but I was in a time crunch
so I went for a graphic design, limited color palette approach. 
Their practice drawings included shading but not the final products. 
I gave the students the option to do sunglasses in lieu of eyes but surprisingly only a few of them took me up on my offer. 

The backgrounds were inspired by Beatriz Milhazes. 
The kids were limited to sharpie, fat black marker, grey marker, and one color. 
After this project we dove into a unit focused on the principles of design, so this was a great segue from the last unit focused on realistic drawing into the new one.