Great to be back with Mr.Healy’s 4th Class Group – what a lovely bunch of students! We have worked together nearly every year since they were in Junior Infants. We think we only missed last year! So it is great to be back with them. We had had a very short chat before Christmas about what they would like to focus on during the 9 weeks of Creativity in the Classroom and some of the suggestions were around drawing and animation. I began with having a look at one of my paintings on the screen. I used Visual Thinking Strategies to facilitate the conversation. Visual Thinking Strategies is a way of slow looking, with a group to look and discuss an artwork through enquiry based questions allowing everyone to make observations, comments and contributions to the conversation and build meaning around the artwork. It was a fascinating conversation as everyone pointed out things they could see and wondered what was the connection between the different elements in the painting and what the story was within the artwork. We could be there yet!
I wanted to look at an artwork that could have many interpretations and also to get the class thinking about how if they are creating an animation that they will need to consider place, setting, characters and narrative or story. And by looking at an artwork they could see all the elements and artist considers in composing a painting.
So building on the idea of individual interpretations we began a drawing and mark making experiments – every one had three drawing tools – pencil, pen and graphite. I gave some “descriptive” words – long, straight, twisty, tangled, slow, fast etc. and everyone was to draw a line that reflected that word. And then we switched drawings around and swopped between people so we were drawing over each others drawings. Finding spaces, building up layers. We continued this until the drawings were really dense with marks and had been passed around a number of times and worked over. I then asked the class to find a part of the drawing they liked or that interested them and to fold the paper to isolate this part of the drawings. We then had a chat about why people had selected what they had selected. Sometimes it was the shape of a line, the pattern or they way different lines met or crossed each other.
This worked really well I thought as they students were making judgements of the drawing based purely on what it looked like as an abstract mark and a drawing – not because it looked like something or represented something. Our next stage was to cut out strips of paper that now would become our lines in 3D. We looked at what we could do with one strip of paper – folding, rolling, tearing, joining, layering etc. So taking their selected drawing as a starting point the class used strips of paper to create their drawing in 3D. This worked out wonderfully! Such creative and inventive responses as the class experimented with the simplest of materials but testing the limits of what could be done with different processes. We had such a busy session I only got to take a few images of the selected areas of the drawings and some of the constructed drawings. We will continue with experimental drawing and gestural mark making next week.
DLR Creativity in the Classroom 