Lines, Lines, and More Lines!!

All the grades begin the year talking about line. When talking about fundamental elements of creating art, line is about as basic as you can get! The lessons on line range in difficulty from just making single strips on line (Kindergarten), to using line to create a paper sculpture with one-point perspective (4th Grade). For this post, I wanted to highlight the second grade project. We talked about contour line and making that line continuous. We made it into a game where we tried so hard not to pick up our markers! At first kids were being silly, but after we practiced a couple of times, it was amazing to see what students observed and were able to draw! I have such good observers in second grade! To warm up we practiced drawing items in the classroom using continuous contour lines.

Then we went outside and did two drawings of three different plants also using continuous contour lines. Students chose their favorite of the two drawings.

 

After students made a selection, I drew two circles on their work in interesting places; one large and one small. We talked about coloring in those circles because they were our special 'color circles'. The colors of the plants and the backgrounds were only visible in those circles. The students were allowed to use whatever colors they wanted and some of the pieces are quite colorful. We spent some time talking about using colored pencils and how going over an area more than one time would give them a nice dark color.

 

 

 

 

Finally I had students tell me how to crop their picture. I cut off those areas using the paper cutter (I cut not the students!). This was a beginning of thinking about composition for them (we'll come back to that later) Overall I think it turned out well and I'm excited that the kids are already establishing good observation skills this early in the year. It's definitely something they will be using all year in art!