Pencil Transformation

I originally came accross this project in a book that I have called From Ordianry to Extraordinary by Ken Veith.

This book has a bunch of good projects that you dont see all the time, but this project is definitely one of my favorites. I've since seen a few versions of it floating around online. I was actually a little afraid to assign this for awhile thinking that it would be too hard for some of my beginning students, but boy was I wrong! The students moaned and groaned when I introduced the assignment, but they took off running and the end results were spectacular! Students had to choose an object, animal, or person to draw and construct the form completely out of drawn pencils. They could manipulate and distort the pencils as much as they needed to to create the desired shape and they were able to use specific parts of the pencils for different areas. I asked them to color them realistically with colored pencils, but i did allow a few to keep them black and white because they did such an amazing job with the shading. Here are are the finished products....

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Fun and Games Drawings

I asked my students to bring in small game pieces and toys from home. They arranged a selected few items into a still life. The goal of the project was to do a colored pencil drawing that was photorealistic, paying close attention to lighting, color, and the size of the objects in relation to each other. I think they did a great job!

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Value Ribbon Words

Now, let me first say that I am currently a bit obsessed with Pinterest! Many (ok most) of my projects and assignments are stemming from there as of late. I've always looked online for project ideas, but now to have so many of them in one place? Well, it's almost too much for me to deal with on a daily basis, but I'm trying! I am slowly pinning away and trying to weed out the good from the bad. It doesn't help that I often get distracted and start pinning tons of things that I'd like to eat! Anyway, my point was that yes, I take a lot of my project ideas from there, but I do try to make them my own, and my students always have unique results. I love having such a huge idea bank at my disposal.

After their Value Scales, my high school Drawing and Painting classes did these 'Ribbon Word' Value Drawings...

Pretty much sums up life, doesn't it? Hee hee. These came out better than i could have possibly imagined! Students had to construct their word out of strips of paper 'ribbons' and tape them down onto a piece of scrap paper. They then had to do a drawing of their word 'sculpture' from observation (Some of them ended up taking photos so that we could maintain consistent lighting conditions, etc.) This was a great way to further practice achieveing value with pencil, and the kids had fun doing it. All of them were really pleased with their drawings. Pin It

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.

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