#5 Pictures Of You

Learning Areas: The Arts- creating and making, exploring and responding, Interpersonal development- working in teams, Communication- listening, viewing and responding, English -language and literature
Materials:  as many white wax crayons as children, heavy A3 paper, paint trays, watercolour paints, brushes, buckets of water, smocks

Tuning In - Let's Read a Book!

Are any of you familiar with this author? 
(holds up book I Want A Pet by Lauren Child) 

I Want A Pet Frances Lincoln Children's Books, 2013

Lauren Child writes and illustrates her own books. She isn’t too worried about being really neat with her lines – in fact she is quite messy, but I think they give a great feeling for what is happening in the story and how all the different characters are feeling.

Exploring: What is a portrait?

Who knows what a portrait is? 
"A picture of something?"
"Is it a pet?"
"Like a picture of somebody?"

That's right. It is usually a picture of a person, although it is also possible to make portraits of animals. Portraits usually show mainly the face of the person or animal, but might include the shoulders, the torso or the whole body. 
Portraits usually try to give you a sense of the character of the person and perhaps something about the way they are feeling. 

There are lots of ways to make a portrait. We are going to use a combination of techniques today.

The first technique is called continuous line

Continuous line is a game that artists like to play. The rules of the game are that once you put your pencil or in our case, crayon onto the paper, you don’t take it off until the drawing is finished. We had a play with continuous line when we drew with chalk out on the basketball court (#4 Big Lines, No End In Sight)

The second rule is that you try to look only at the person you are drawing – not at the paper.

Artists who make portraits

Self Portrait, Tracey Manuel, Date?

Look at this self-portrait (above). A self-portrait is when the artist has made a picture of themselves. This picture has been made by placing a black crayon (charcoal, chalk pastel or oil pastel) on the page and not taking if off until the picture is finished. 

Look at this second portrait of a woman (below).We don't need to feel limited by the colours that we see. An artist can paint, draw, paste or sculpt in the colours that convey what they want to say about what they see. 

Portrait of Lydia , Henri Matisse,  1947

Making - Part A 

We will use a crayon to draw portraits of one another. Here’s the tricky part – we are going to use white crayons. So even if you do look at your paper you won’t see much. There is a magic trick we’re going to do with our continuous line portraits but I’m going to keep that as a surprise.

The important things to remember are : 
1) Keep your crayon on the page. 
2) Look at the person you are drawing and 
3) to make our magic work you need to press quite hard with your crayon.

Drawing me drawing you drawing me... Image Copyright H.Marsh, 2013
*please do not repost images of children. This is against Australia law unless you have parental permission

The children set to work. They are seated in pairs across from one another: each drawing the other drawing. 
Preps and ones find it almost impossible to look at their subject and not at the page. I'm not sure that they even have any choice in this - it is as though when their hand is moving they must watch their hand. I find it so interesting to learn about the developmental stages and how they apply to art. Still, they are trying to represent the person in front of them and the style of each child is unique. 

Making - Part B

Now it’s time to make our magic.

I would like you to lay out your line portraits face down on the table. Your teacher and I are going to come around and write your name as artist and the name of the person you drew.

Great. Let me show you a line drawing I made earlier today.

Portrait of Juno , Image Copyright Heather Marsh, 2013

This portrait was made using a technique called wax resist. 
The waxy crayon acts just like an umbrella for the paper - letting the watery paint bead off - it won't stick to the page- leaving it white where you have drawn. 

We are going to re-use some techniques you guys are already familiar with. Do you remember when we make our colour targets with water colour? (#3 Blending colour, transforming spaces)

Can anyone tell me the techniques that helped us when we were working with that medium?
"Wash your brush?"  - yes, wash your brush between colours. 

"Don't drip water" - yes, wipe a little water off your brush, but remember we need the paint to be wet for this to work
"Be..don't bump or walk on other stuff" - yes, be respectful of each other as we share the paint trays. Don't walk on other people's art. Be aware of how you are moving in the space. 

It looks like chaos but it works! Image Copyright Heather Marsh, 2013

The results... 

Reflection

Lets talk about our work:

What did you notice about making your portraits. What was hard? What was easy? What worked? What didn’t work?
"I wanted to look" 
" I had to cheat and look"
" I didn't like that I couldn't see my drawing but I liked doing the magic later with the paint" 

New vocabulary portrait, self-portrait, continuous line, wax resist

#4 Big Lines, No End In Sight

Learning Areas: The Arts- creating and making, exploring and responding, Health and Physical Education- gross motor skills, Geography - spatial awareness, Communication- listening, viewing and responding, English -language and literature, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
Materials: pavement chalk 

Tuning In: Remembering the element of colour

Lets take a moment to remember all the work we did with the element of colour. What can you remember?
"Finding the rainbows"
"When we stuck our colour targets to the walls"
"Making new colours with paint"
That's great - can any of you remember some of the new words we learned? What was the word for the rainbow colours - it was the visible...
With a bit of prompting they remember visible spectrum, primary and secondary colours and installation. 

Exploring: The element of line

Colour is just one of the elements an artist can use to express their ideas. Over the next few weeks we are going to collect more elements which you can combine to bring your ideas to life. 

I showed the class a quick line drawing I have made for them using different weight markers. (I frequently make new work inspired by class- it's a great motivator!) and we spend a little time noticing thick lines and thin lines, wavy, jagged, vertical, horizontal,concentric, zig-zag and scribbly lines. We also noticed how lines were used for representational drawing and the areas where the lines were abstract.

Quick Line Drawing - Image Copyright Heather Marsh, 2013

Exploring some more: Let's read a book!

I read the class the story Say Hello by Jack and Michael Foreman. It uses a single continuous line throughout the illustrations, which, in turn becomes the horizon and various scenes on the pages. As usual we used our 'artist eyes' to notice things on the page. 

Say Hello Published Candlewick Press, 2012

Still Exploring..Artist Feature - Aboriginal artists

We looked at three important Indigenous (Australian) artists and how they have each used line differently - to map the contours of the land, to depict cracked claypans and to mimic and mock modern art.
Drawing the land- Kaliangku the claypans painting of Jackie Kurltjunqinja Gile (Mr. Giles)
Critiquing the politics of art - Scientia e metaphysica, 2002  by Richard Bell
Mapping - the contour line paintings of Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa  

Untitled Ronnie Tjampitjinpa 2001 (Art Gallery of NSW)

Making - Worlds biggest continuous line work?
When we got onto making the real fun began. I explained to them the concept of continuous line - that as an exercise, sometimes artists will experiment with not taking their pencil off the page until the work is complete. 

We are going to use chalk now to draw onto a very large surface – the basketball court. It is going to be a very big artwork.  I would like you to each take a piece of chalk – it will stay your piece for the whole time we work. 

Massive continuous line work *please note it is illegal to repost images of children without parent permission

I would like you to try to draw patterns with your chalk using an unbroken line. (draw example on the whiteboard) so that if I found the very beginning of your line I could follow it all the way to the end where you finished. 
After we finish the art will get worn away by people walking on it and washed by the rain. This type of art-making is called ephemeral, which means it isn't meant to last.

Remember, the only rule in this art game is: do not take your chalk off the ground until it is completely used up. 

Some of the children worked in small groups *please do not repost images of children 

Some children went on long solo journeys with their chalk 
*please do not repost images of children 

Reflection 
Instead of discussing our work as a group, I asked the children to stand up on the seats by the side of the court and walked up to each in turn asking "Tell me about your line." The children each described a completely unique individual process. 
"I, like went as fast as I could from one end to the other to see how quick I could use up my chalk"
"I sort of drew around the other guys" (at which I commented that he had essentially mapped the movement of the other artists for us) 
"I wanted to draw things- it was hard not taking the chalk off"

New Vocabulary vertical, horizontal, concentric, contour,  ephemeral 
Further Explorations contour lines and mapping, aboriginal desert communities, being inclusive (Say Hello)