Still Life

My 2nd year students took a break from fun projects to have a day to practice and learn about still life. Even though they are young, I think it is important for them to start learning and practicing how to see when we draw and make art.  

To start the class, we looked at still life paintings and talked about common elements we saw in all of them. We talked about the difference between a landscape, portrait and still life and students were able to differentiate between all of them. 

Once they had a good understanding of the things we could find in a still life, I gave them some tips about how to draw what we see. Since my students are young, I kept the instructions simple: showing them how to draw a table, that things should not be flying but they should be on a table and to be aware of what items are taller, shorter, wider or smaller than the others. 

I drew a "bad" still life and they had apply the tips we learned about as they looked for the flaws in my drawing. Once everyone had a good grasp on the basic we learned, they started drawing. 

On the table, I arranged different objects from around the classroom. The objects ranged from easy to draw, hard to draw, tall, short, and wide so that students would have different levels of difficulty as they drew. As they drew, I walked around and reminded them to look closely and see which items should be taller and to keep them all on the table they drew.

When students finished drawing, I had them trace their drawing with a black marker so the final image looked cleaner.