Landscape Drawing

Students learned how to interpret foreground middleground and background using their own landscape drawing and magazine pictures. My students love to look through magazines, so giving them the opportunity to add magazine cutouts to their art really inspired them. They had to use their knowledge of size to place their magazine cutouts in either the foreground (larger images), middleground (medium sized images) or the background (smaller images). This example is from a third grade student.

Georgia O'Keefe Value Drawing

I was lucky enough for a teacher to let me borrow a cow skull for this project. Having this for the kids to observe while they were drawing was a wonderful thing.This picture is an example I made for the students. We looked at the cow skull paintings of Georgia O'Keefe and discussed how she created the skull and the background. Before beginning their drawing, I demonstrated making a value scale. Each student made their own value scale and then were encouraged to use it to create a drawing of a cow skull. I demonstrated drawing the basic shapes of the skull to start their drawing and how to use the value scale to help with shading. I could see a huge difference in the way my third graders were drawing after they were introduced to value.

Home

I would like to begin with a positive: In September 2007, one of my talented art students declared, "I'm home!" upon entering the art room. There's nothing like a genuinely kind child to brighten your day.