Kluender Art 8 Hands

Art 8 is finally done with their Symbolic Hand Drawings! They did SUCH A GREAT JOB! As part of our pre-assessment for the year, students were asked to do a study of their hand. A lot of students traced their hand and/or struggled with drawing hands. I thought tackling a difficult task would be a great way to boost these young artists self-esteem! Once they realized they could do it, and compared the before and after, I think they realized that there is a lot to learn this year in Art, and that they will all benefit from improving their observational drawing skills!

Just check out these amazing drawings! Students drew their hands holding a personal object they brought from home. By drawing something personal, they have included some information about themselves and are challenging the viewer to engage in a visual conversation with their artwork. 

Students also had the option to create a digital version by scanning their drawings into Adobe Photoshop CS2. We got some pretty creative results!

Kluender: Art 8

Art 8 is shading, shading, shading! It's SO EXCITING to see these hand drawings coming to completion! 

These 8th graders have worked past artist's block, self doubt, and drawing difficulty to produce some really great drawings! 

Stay tuned for images of some AMAZING RESULTS!!!!!!! 

Kluender: Art 8

Art 8 has two main goals this year- to improve their OBSERVATIONAL DRAWING skills and to include CONTENT in their artwork. This means that our 8th grade artists will be learning to "see with their eyes, not just their brains" and to think about "why" artists make artwork and to add meaning to their artwork. My goal is for them to learn how to make the viewer engage in a "conversation" with their artwork, to want to know more about the subject matter, not just focus on improving skills.

We started out the year by learning a bit about VALUE (shading) and how to create that using graphite pencils. We learned that a #2 pencil is an HB pencil, that B pencils have darker and softer lead, and H pencils have harder and lighter lead. We created a few value scales to practice our shading skills.

 Then, we discussed Observational Drawing. I asked the class to draw an apple from memory, then I showed them an apple to draw. We discussed the differences in what your brain perceives and what your eye actually sees. 

We had a short demo on how to draw hands. Students were asked to bring in a small hand-held personal item from home that represented something about themselves. We are currently drawing our hands holding the item. We will be finishing these in grayscale value using the drawing pencils.