Value Drawing

This year I am teaching two Drawing and Painting 1 classes and two Drawing and Painting 2 classes. Since I am new to my school ( and the students) I decided to start both classes off with the same projects in an effort to guage where the students are in terms of their skills before deciding which direction I wanted to head in.

I had my students start with a basic value scale in pencil. They had to use the classic method of making 10 boxes and shading them from light to dark to achieve as many shades of grey as they could in between the black and white squares.

To make this project a bit more exciting, I then had them create a stencil that allowed them to cut their chosen shape out of their shaded boxes. They then had to arrange their shapes in a fun composition to display their value scale.

The resulting pieces turned out quite nicely, and took what i feel can be an otherwise boring "warm-up" project and made it a little more fun for the students.