Negative Space Tools

Elementary students enjoyed working with contour line with tools.  They were learning how to see both the positive space (the object they are drawing) and the negative space (the space around the object).  It is important to learn to see both if you want to learn to draw accurately and this project takes concentration, especially when coloring it!

 Students choose real tools (yes, I did discuss tool safety) and began with a contour line drawing.  They were learning about good composition and filling the space well.  They then drew a rectangle on the page, going right over the objects they had drawn. Inside the rectangle, they were to color in the negative space, not the objects themselves.  After this step was completed, they were to work on coloring in the positive space (the tools) around the border using marker.  They were to use only one color to do both of these steps first.  Afterward they could color in all the white space with another color if they liked. 

Folk Art 'Quilt' completed

Students at all grade levels completed their 'quilts and added borders before gluing them to a colored background.  Lots of creative ideas from the students on this one!  It was also a good problem solving task when they missed the opportunity to do alternating positive/negative space with the coloring.  Students really enjoyed personalizing this and making it their own.

Folk Art

Sewing theme

Chubby animals!

Use of two colors...

Love the size of these symbols

Christmas and nice job keeping simple shapes!

We were studying the terms primitive, naive, and folk artists and how these terms are used.  All have to do with an untrained artist with their work being very child-like.  Their perspective and proportions are usually off as well.  We were focusing on Grandma Moses and the amazing story of her success as such a late age in life, her late 70's. Students looked closely at her paintings and observed how much she painted like she stitched her embroidery work with blocks of separate colors. She has such charming work and I love how her paintings tell a story.

We discussed different forms of folk art and how it was often utilitarian in nature, such as weathervanes, decoys, quilts, etc.  We are working on a 'quilt' of our own and keeping the shapes simple in the style of folk artists.  Students are choosing a theme for their work and had to divide the paper into 16 squares.  Each square needs to have an image which took some time to draw.  We will be doing a border for these quilts next week and coloring in one or two colors of marker, focusing on alternating negative space and positive space.  Fun and cannot wait to see them completed!  I did this before with a class and we put them all together to make one big quilt, which is fun if you can leave them hanging on display in a classroom. More images of the complete work next week.

Colored pencil- Top hats

Our class is working on learning how to blend with colored pencil using analagous colors.  The viewer should not be able to see blocks of color but see many different colors throughout the area.  I had the younger group do the negative space of these hats and the older students worked on the positive space of a Florida creature, exaggerating and abstracting the shape/texture they might see on the animal. I will post some of the Florida animals this next week.