Just look around you

There is always plenty to draw. Just look around you.

You can look outside school . . . 

or inside.

You can look down.

(Yes. Our school was old enough to still have heating pipes!)

You can draw it however you like.

You can look at each other.

 

You can even draw each other drawing.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

Zoo

On a Y5/6 zoo visit, each group of children chose a particular animal to study and draw. By this stage of the year, they had had a lot of opportunity to develop their observed drawing skills. (See PAGE Draw what you see.) Even so, the task was not altogether easy. It was a good, modern zoo, with large, natural enclosures. Some animals were just too far away, or hiding completely. Those that were close seemed perversely unwilling to pose long enough for a portrait. Nonetheless, the children made a good fist of their sketching, adding notes about colour, texture, etc., as well as words to describe the creature’s character, movement and apparent mood.

Back in the classroom, they worked up their sketches into full pictures using pastels on black sugar paper. It was suggested that they did not need to try to reproduce their sketches exactly, but rather use them as a guide, focusing mainly on capturing the ‘essence’ of the particular creature they had observed.

I remember vividly the set of resulting pictures, perhaps because the images themselves were so vivid and characterful. Sadly, for reasons I no longer recall, I do not seem to have recorded very many of them. However, here are the ones that do appear to have survived.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

Special visitors

We were very lucky. Sometimes special visitors to our school were kind enough to come wearing traditional clothes from their own culture and to allow the children to draw them.

 

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

After L.S.Lowry

Here the children did not aim to copy directly any particular painting , but to use L.S.Lowry’s style and subject matter as an inspiration for their own images.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

Sleepers - 1

Whilst hearing Michelle Magorian’s ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’ read aloud as a class book, the children were also learning about life on the Home Front during WWII. At one stage, this included looking at some of artist Henry Moore’s drawings of people sleeping in the London Underground during air raids. 

Henry Moore

Following on from this, the children did their own drawings of sleeping figures. They were not trying to copy the Moore drawings, or even relate this work directly to the war. In fact this artwork lead on rather to thinking about homeless people and writing some poems about them. (I dearly wish Onjali Q. Rauf’s ‘The Night Bus Hero’ had been around back then. But of course it wasn’t.)

The children took turns at modelling and drawing. The models were ‘posed’ by the artists. They were lying down (on gym mats) so it was not too hard for them to keep still.  Even so I made sure that the sketches were quick ones, and the models posed for no longer that ten minutes, including regular stretches. I thought that was plenty long enough for children - and some of them found even that an inordinately long time!

Again I think you can see clearly how each child is discovering their own way of drawing, even though they are all drawing 

from direct observation.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

Sleepers - 2

As a continuation of this work, some  children created a second piece using a limited colour palette of oil pastels. They worked from their original drawings, but did not try to replicated them exactly. Rather they focused on simplifying what they saw as the main shapes in their composition. This moved some of the finished pictures towards more abstract images and brought them nearer to the mood and feel of the Henry Moore drawings, without actually copying them or losing any of the children’s individual expression.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

Drawing white on black

After observing some house shapes, printing straight lines with white paint and the edge of a piece of card, enhanced by some simple brush lines, simplified the forms and moved these images pleasingly towards abstract.

In more realistic vein, drawing with white on black sometimes brought variety and freshness to the activity as well as to the children’s completed images.

There are also times when adding some black pastel to black paper can be very effective, particularly when the paper is not quite as black as the added pigment.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)

A tree is just a tree

One observed subject. Different approaches in different mediums.

(For anyone interested, notes on the teaching approaches that helped children towards these outcomes are on the COMMENTARY PAGES of this blog.)