Value Scale Still Life
Ashleigh's Year Three and Four class came to the art room today. I knew that they would be up to the challenge of working on an art lesson that I usually reserve for Year Five and Six students.
Our first exercise today was to work on mark making techniques. The students made a range of pencil marks on paper including heavy, thick, thin, straight, curvy, pointy, dotty, angry or happy marks. The students were very engaged and had a great time creating as many different marks as they could. We shared our work in a mini ‘gallery’ and the students complimented each other on different marks that they liked. The students repeated the activity with crayons and dye.
Next I showed the students how to make value scales. The students were amazing listeners and applied their new learning eagerly. The art room was a humming with little artists creating their value scales - some kids even made two! I love teaching students about value and form and have a variety of lessons in my teaching toolkit. Today’s lesson was an adaptation of a lesson that I came across a long time ago and have been waiting for the right time to use it.
The next part of the lesson was to apply the value scale colours to a drawing to create the illusion of shape. The students chose to draw either a cup, mug or ball. I showed them how to separate the object into five sections and then apply the five colours from their value scale to the artwork. When they were dry we glued the artworks to newspaper and drew shadows using black pastel. I think the finished artworks are terrific and I know the kids are very proud of them!
