If I Could Draw Anywhere...

This week we worked on the art element of space. After reading a section of the book “Blue Fingers”, I had everyone practice different aspects of showing space on their pieces of paper. They would draw a horizontal line down the center of four boxes and then draw circles overlapping in one, higher and lower circles in another, and bigger and smaller circles in the third. Though some of them seemed confused about which box to put different aspects in and where to put their circles, most of them got the hang of it and were able to use these aspects correctly in their next assignment. The next assignment was using the element of space in a mythical land. I let them get as creative as they wanted as long as they used at least two of the aspects that we went over. I was amazed by their creativity and their ability to use space with different objects. Some students drew a land of candy with chocolate rivers that were thinner at the top and bigger at the bottom, a great way to show space. Another student made a land where everything was a vampire, even the rocks. He used overlapping of rocks and bigger and smaller objects. They were all super engaged with this assignment and had a lot of fun with it. They were very excited to share with me what they had created. After they had a lot of practice with using space, we were able to move onto the comics. We came up with four main events that happened in the story and the class worked together to put them in the correct order, they were then given the rest of class to work on their comics. They all used the elements of space effectively, though many of them did need reminders to include or horizon line. I noticed some students putting objects directly on top of the horizon line, so they may need more direction on where to put objects relative to this line in the future, but besides this, I saw a lot of improvement in their ability to represent space in their drawings. This week we also decided to bind all of the student's comics together up to this point so they can keep track of their comics and can see where their final project is heading. It also has blank pages with 4 boxes ready for comics in following weeks. This was very helpful because it keeps their comics more organized and it takes less time to hand out paper and have everyone fold their pages correctly.

Following is the link to this week's lesson plan: