Little Details, Big Discoveries
This week in The Art Room we continued our drawing discoveries by zooming in on detail. Building on last week’s activities and our understanding of shape and form, our focus was on texture and how to represent different materials and surface detail in our drawings, by simply using a pencil. And with the session falling within ‘Houseplant Week’ we couldn’t resist filling our workspace with a lovely selection of leafy pot plants to provide the perfect focal point for our drawing explorations.
We started the session, by talking about how an object might feel and practiced drawing different types of line to show various textures – smooth, stoney, woven, or fluffy – and completed some practice worksheets to familiarise ourselves with mark-making techniques used by artists to create texture and shading in their drawings: vertical lines for hatching; stippling with tiny dots; a lose circular motion for scribbly impressions and organic, looping shapes for a wood grain effect.
After this, our older artists had great fun playing a lucky-dip drawing game. Having selected an unseen object from a bag of household items, the children were challenged to resist a sneaky peek and use only their sense of touch to assess the size, shape, texture and other tiny details of the object they were holding out of sight; they had to think really hard about how to translate what they could feel to then sketch it out on paper. We were so impressed by the finished drawings and how carefully everyone had drawn specific details to provide clues about their chosen object’s identity and what material it was made from.
The session continued with a quick step-by-step guide on how to draw a spider plant to demonstrate to the children how they might build their composition, starting with a sketch of the pot to guide them on scale, and how to consider depth when drawing leaves and stalks that tangle and overlap each other. Finally, the children did a fantastic job working on their own still-life drawings of the plants and foliage on display before them at the table. It was great to see so many of the tips and techniques the children had practiced beforehand being employed in their artworks to bring them to life.
Our younger artists also showed enormous progress this week using their observation skills to help them create simple line drawings of flowering plants and practicing their pencil control as well as the scale of the shapes they were drawing. Everyone was encouraged to think of a material they had practiced drawing earlier in the session and to incorporate that into their drawing in some way. We loved seeing the different details each child was drawn to focus on and really enjoyed sharing our finished work with each other at the end of the class. The children should all feel very proud of themselves for trying new things and working so hard to execute their drawings independently. It’s been lovely to see their confidence grow and we are excited to see how their drawing skills will take off in a different way next week!
