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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Middle School Mendhi Hands

This was the first project that i did with my middle schoolers this year and it was a great ice breaker! I showed them a brief presentation on mendhi/henna hand designs. I also included information on the meanings of specific symbols so I asked them to trace their hand and then, using colored pencil, fill them with designs and symbols that described/represented them. These small symbolic self portraits got the kids talking to each other and allowed me to learn about a little bit about them during those fisrt few days of school.

When everyone was finished, I arranged all the hands onto a page for each class so that it became the classes' collective self portrait. Pin It