Start of the line drawing
The lesson started as a warm up to getting my students ready for the start of the school year. The students in this class may have had middle school art classes or not. All students had a semester of our required semester of Foundations of Art. I wanted to assess where this group of students were starting, so I can modify my lessons to accelerate the skills of each student. I work with a modified TAB classroom setting. I am focused on being student centered with room to support and engage my students. It is my goal to help them feel successful and challenged with each lesson. I have high expectations but I know the building blocks need to be there so my students can achieve. This lesson started with Line. Some of my students did not work with ink well and quill so a tutorial was needed along with how to build up values with ink. I demonstrated and shared with them examples of depth with ink: cross-hatching, hatching, stippling, and scribbling. I have students use invented application of values as well. The expectations were to create a panoramic drawing demonstrating foreground, middle, and background. The theme was to share what they did over the summer. Where did they go? Who did they visit? What did they eat? What activities did they experience? If ink spills happened and they do, the students needed to problem solve the ink blobs. Some students did very rich layered scenes and others had very controlled defined imagery. I was thrilled that the students felt free to express themselves as individuals and not to conform to the piece next to them.
Creating the viewing window
Lifeguard
Next piece of the finished composition involved cutting into a heavy weight black paper page. The length of the black paper was about three inches longer to allow for the piece to arch in front of the drawing to create a 3-D viewing window. The theme of the cut outs had to relate to the line drawing theme. So students had to decide what would be the motif for the viewing spaces and where did the spaces need to be placed to focus on particular areas of the drawing. This is a challenge for some students because you need to design a shape to remove without having the whole window falling a part. The art of Notan applies here as well as an understanding of a stencil. Some students wanted to de-emphasize areas of their drawings so they selected not to reveal it through the cut out window area. This allowed students to decide what the viewer would focus on when viewing the art piece. We did have to do a few repairs with scrap pieces of black paper but the majority of the students did a great job. Students layered the black cut out over the drawing and made decisions on how much more did they need to cut out and what would that shape be that would still maintain the integrity of the black window and stick to the over all design theme.
Down at the Shore
View into the window
College visits and basketball
Wildcats
Out West
The final display of the class works engaged the viewers in a new way and the verbal responses encouraged my artists even more.
Art Around 
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