One thing I try to do every year with the 1st grade students is a step by step drawing that is then painted. These serves a couple of different purposes. First of all it makes the students slow down with their drawing. There are many students who rush through the most important part of any piece of art work, the sketching and drawing part! Second, it helps them to edit their artwork by giving them several opportunities to redraw their picture without having to erase over and over.
We spent two class periods, practicing the dragon that we were eventually going to draw on a canvas board. Students were told that they would only get one canvas board and so we needed to practice drawing the dragon several times on scrap paper. I think kids really get hung up on the idea that their artwork has to be perfect and they get frustrated when it isn't right the first time. For me personally, I know there is a lot of freedom in the idea of sketching. Practice drawings are what I call sketches with the younger kids, and it helps them to sharpen their ideas and edit when necessary.
In between sketches we talked about things that we didn't like on each one (the wings, the body shape, the feet etc...), that way students could mentally make a note to themselves to change these things on their next practice drawing.
After going through the practice drawing several times, students each got a small canvas board and did their (hopefully) perfected drawing of a dragon on it. I stressed drawing lightly since erasing on a canvas board isn't easy.
The next class we painted these bad boys. I had students use acrylic paint. I feel that the color and coverage of acrylic is better on canvas than tempera. I had several colors and each student had an individual palette and could pick up to three colors.
Our next step was to paint the background all black. In an effort to keep things clean I had students leave an outline of white around the dragons. Some were good at it, some had a hard time. Either way, they were paying attention to their brush and making sure that didn't paint over the dragon.
Our last step was done today actually! Students painted fire coming out of the dragon's mouth. I did it at the beginning of class and then cleaned up and used the rest of class time for something else. Here's a really well done finished product!
In other news, I think I finally finished my felted sweater. I'm not sure if I'm in love with it. I tried adding blue but really didn't like the way it looked. I still think it's missing something. If you have any grand ideas, let me know :)
