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The arts are necessary in our schools for a great many reasons. This blog is a celebration of those reasons. Crystallizing education means helping students discover their strengths and optimize their potential intelligences.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Lesson Plan, oh Lesson Plan, where art thou?

It has recently come to my attention that a lesson plan which I have been working on for a drawing/painting class might resemble a lesson that some students have already done in a prior year. I had lots of hopes for this lesson, and it is a shame that I must ditch it. Fear not, for this plan shall be used in the future. The challenge now, is developing a new lesson that deals with similar techniques and study, but does not resemble the prior lesson's end result.

The goal is to develop a lesson plan that deals with contour line, and value. The original had students drawing a group of still life objects (bottles, vases, etc) three times from different perspectives and then over lapping all of those drawings to create a cubist final piece. The final piece would be finished in color and utilize value changes. So, now I set out to create something that deals with the same methods, but renders a different result.

My sights have turned to Escher for inspiration
Something along the lines of this drawing here, but with still life objects as the subject material.
Another idea would be to create an odd shaped grid and fitting the entire scene of the still life set-up on the page, but morphing it with the changes in grid. That would hopefully end with something similar to the image below.
Other images that have provided inspiration by Escher:

Maybe, the project could involve fitting the objects into a puzzle of some sort. The end result would leave no background space; every shape is an object that fits into every other shape. This could work, but might involve too much morphing of objects, which is beyond many of the students abilities and falls too far away from the intended skill learner, which is direct observation drawing.
I shall put on my thinking cap and continue to search through media.
This searching always presents interesting finds. Such as this amazing picture inspired by Escher's famous work.
Makes me think of Star Wars. Awesome.

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