Thursday, March 25, 2010

Blind Contour Portraits

      Students worked "blind" as they drew self portraits without looking at the drawing paper.  Using a mirror, they were instructed to trace their face with their eyes and observe the actual shapes and lines they see and draw them without picking up their drawing tool, or looking at the drawing paper.  To insure that students did not "cheat", their papers were placed inside a paper bag while they drew.

      Students drew with a wax crayon, and then finished the portrait using watercolor to obtain interesting facial tones which resisted the wax lines so as not to loose the original expressive quality of the automatic drawing.

Block Printing

     Students have their first experience working with Printmaking through the simple block print method. This project teaches how to understand positive and negative space and challenges students to understand how to engineer a block print to communicate the space accurately.