Snow Gloves

Sideways snow,  I run from car to school blinded by stinging ice pellets. I'm greeted by the red blinking message alert: my student teacher sits awaiting rescue, car trapped in a ditch on her first day, poor thing. A rough start to a new term. It's January in Michigan. We burrow deeper into our parkas trying to avoid the pain of winter.

My family is gloveless this week  Lesson plans trump comfort. Cold hands a small sacrifice for an art project. I'm teaching the basics. Line defines shape, shading reveals form....we're drawing gloves. Learning to see. 

Outside it's a whiteout, cars crawl by in the snowy dark, red tail lights barely visible. Inside, my students, one eye closed against depth perception, are ants crawling along the contour of gloves, finding the mountains, valleys and cliffs of the outside line. It is a slow journey. We are trying to whiteout their mental picture of a glove: four fingers and a thumb. Although they can not actually 'see' all the fingers, they are smart. They know they're there. Not trusting my method, those extra fingers sometimes appear anyway. Amputation solves the problem.

As ants they forget about fingers. The landscape of a glove takes on a whole new geography. They begin to see the line, the line reveals the shape. The blob of a glove they've created seems disappointing at first. "I messed up" a common cry, looking at the odd shape on their paper, nothing like their idea of a glove. 

But now, half blind, I urge them onto the inner continent adding detail lines, texture and shading. Across the room someone utters a hushed, "wow" in awe as a glove pops from the white surface.

The blizzard is forgotten as we all consider this new reality of an ant's view. Somewhere down a dark snowy road my student teacher breathes a sigh of relief watching the tow truck lights approach. Tomorrow will be a great first day.

Learning to Draw: Confidence Plus Effort Equals Success!

On the first day of class, each term, I ask my students to raise their hand if they can draw a stick figure or a happy face. Usually most every hand goes up. I follow this easy question with a harder one: How'd you learn? "I don't know" or a shrug of the shoulders is the typical response. Probing deeper, kids will say they watched someone else, or copied or just figured it out. Great! I tell them, that's how you LEARN to draw anything.
Most middle school students (and lots of adults, too) think that being a good artist means you can just naturally draw well. To relieve the anxiety many middle school students feel about art class and their own assessment of their lack of drawing ability, I start class by insisting that being a good artist isn't about natural drawing skills, that drawing skills can be learned, just like learning to draw a stick figure or write alphabet letters.
During the past week my students learned contour line drawing and gradual tone shading. They learned how to use a valuable art tool, the index finger, to smudge graphite as they shaded, they learned to use an eraser to reveal highlights and most importantly they learned to see with their eyes, not with their mind, so that they could draw the shoe in front of them with all its creases, tears, and scuff marks, not the idea of a shoe in their mind's eye.
The results of these simple drawing lessons amaze the students. Last Friday my second hour class installed our SHOE exhibit in the cafeteria. They hung 72 shoe drawings - one from every student in three classes. Sure, some are "better" or more accurately drawn than others, but each drawing shows amazing growth in the way the individual artist learned to see shape and form, highlights and shadows, and depict this on the 2-D surface of the paper.
Several teachers and a lunch lady commented on what excellent drawing skills this particular group of students has. I nodded my head in agreement, but silently added, EVERY group of students can draw, when they combine a few simple skills with confidence and effort!

Contour Line Drawing with a Twist

It all started with a basic contour line drawing of a shoe followed by a simple challenge: You've drawn it while looking, now close your eyes and try it blind. The results were funny, we laughed and I was ready to move on to the SERIOUS drawing lessons.

But the 7th graders in this class are never predictable and rarely serious. Someone suggested trying it backwards and before I knew it the kids were all up out of their seats practically dislocating their shoulders to draw on the desk behind them. The results were almost as hilarious as watching this room full of contortionists trying to draw a shoe.

Then, Travis, known as DaTravio in the art room, drew a pretty decent shoe with his elbow, so everyone had to try that!
Clearly, when roucous laughter broke out in the corner of the room and shoes were flying off feet instead of being carefully drawn by studious art students, all hope was lost for completing that day's carefully planned lesson. Soon everyone had their shoes off, pencils gripped between toes, drawing shoes on the floor. It was an unpredictably wonderful place for my simple contour line drawing lesson to end up!