Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Gesture Drawing: First Grade

The first graders have been learning about line and shape this year.  Our most recent project included a little gesture figure drawing as a warm up.  It was so much fun.


I asked a volunteer to come
 to the front of the room and stand on a small table (don't tell.)  Then we looked at the line his body made. Usually it was a pretty straight line. Then I had the volunteer change his body into a different kind of line or shape.  Then we made q
uick gesture drawings of our model.  I taught the kids to just make sweeping oval shapes to represent the trunk and limbs of the body. 


We did several of these dra
wings very quickly with several different models. Each model had to strike a dynamic pose that we hadn't seen before.  Then I played music for about 30 seconds and let the kids draw during that time. When the music stopped, they had to stop.  It was fun. The best part was that they really got the idea of looking at the model more than at their papers.  I loved watching them work.
This is an example from a boy who always draws tiny.  Even though I asked him to draw larger, I still LOVE this little sequence. It almost looks like a diagram of a cartwheel.

Next week I'll show you the next phase of this project.

1 comment:

Jeanne said...

This is great you see such movement.