Students love using the tools that professional artists use. I am always impressed by the work young artists create when given the opportunity to play with charcoal, smudge sticks, and kneaded erasers. These beautiful fall fruit drawings by my 4th Grade artists were no exception.
My first step was to call up our local Whole Foods. The staff is helpful, friendly, and very willing to help support local student art. They generously donated all the apples and pears for these still life set ups. Thank you, Whole Foods!!! I then had fun arranging the fruit on some overturned boxes covered in fabric. I also took pictures from each seat around the table just in case the set up toppled. Finally, I asked our Technology master to set up a document camera for the demonstration. I was teaching this lesson at my daughter's school the week before, and fell in love with their document camera. If you haven't used one yet, try it out! It makes demonstrations much more effective.
We started with a class discussion about the differences between a circle and a sphere. We then studied how artists use value to transform simple shapes into a 3D forms. I finished by demonstrating how to lightly sketch the still life. Drawing from life intimidates most everyone. Taking the time to do a thorough demonstration, and teaching students some drawing tricks like how to first put in the tops and bottoms of each piece of fruit really helps. I stopped the demo here, and let the class get to work on their sketches. Once most students were ready to move on to charcoal, I did another demonstration on how to look for shadows and highlights, and how to use the charcoal to transform their sketch into a 3 dimensional drawing.
This is one of those lessons that really challenges students to stick with the process. When they do, they become more comfortable with the new medium, and really learn how to use it to create beautiful drawings.
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