The luxury of a project week, but the balance has to be right!

The fragmented nature of the school week, with in my case lessons of 60 minutes, often rather dictates what’s possible and what’s not.  A chance to work on a project for a more extended time doesn’t come along so often.

A project week, without the regular timetable offers so many possibilities.  Things that perhaps simply aren’t possible in a series of shorter sessions, or a chance to press on more rapidly to carry a project or theme much further than you might normally do.  Yet, despite such potential opportunities, often the results of a project week don’t make the best of these chances.

When I first entered education, I was told, ‘get your lesson material right, and the rest will normally follow’, a project week is no exception to this rule.  Sometimes judging the amount of time needed by pupils to complete their tasks can be a challenge and with the quantity of tasks needed to fill a whole day of activities.  But above all what seems to be crucial is variety in work forms, along with a series of cut-off points where a new phase in the project begins.

I have just designed and completed a project that ran for two four-hour sessions.  It had a series of inter-related, but distinctively different parts to it and focused on a number of themes and skills:

In a little more detail these steps ran roughly in this order:

By the end of the first day, all the manipulated photographs were presented in a signal digital artwork.  The second day offered a longer session focusing on two activities, but the pupils involved had to choose only the one they felt most drawn to:

The group I was working with was a class of 32, academically strong 13 and 14 year olds.

Looking back at the project and having discussed the way it ran with the pupils themselves, I see only very minor adjustments to be needed for a future rerunning of the assignments.

Below are the results of the project, the 3D design work, using Tinkercad.com as a design tool still have to be printed, but the documentation of the results shows how well the pupils picked this up.

Should you be interested in the specific lesson material I used for the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch, I’m happy to share it.

Night School – an online (and in school) exhibition of where I work

A few weeks ago, as a sort of trailer for this post, I published a single drawing I had made of the school where I work.  Now the full set……

Night School

I have worked at Maasland College in Oss, the Netherlands for more than twenty years. I teach, I paint in my own studio at home, I draw when I travel, and yet in all that time I have never made a drawing of my workplace. Time for a change! A few months ago I started with a first drawing. Happy with the result, I continued. It then became a series of nine drawings of different corners of the school, based on photographs I took early on winter mornings when it was dark outside and the corridors were empty, almost, you could say, a kind of Night School.

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Night School

The school community will be able to see the exhibition firsthand, everyone else will hopefully enjoy the digital version here.

They are a little different to the images that I normally make, but certainly form a good set.  You can find these drawings and other series of my studio work at my recently renovated website:

https://petersansom.art

Drawing my work place

I draw quite a bit.  Whenever I travel one of my drawing books travels with me. In my studio work I plan and prepare using drawings (on paper or digitally) to plot the way ahead.  Yet in we’ll over twenty years working in education I have never turned my attention towards my working environment in the form of drawing it.

A while back I decided it might be an interesting challenge to pick up, and so a series of drawings began.  I’m still working on the series.  I don’t think they are ever going to become more than a series of drawings; I’m not expecting to take them into a series of paintings.  But they are starting to become something of a ‘complete set’ in my view.

In many ways they are fairly detached from the paintings I make.  Although they do share a certain geometric quality.  The architecture of the buildings l work in have plenty of interesting angles and lines.  Maybe that’s what kept me interested while I have been drawing.

A full display of the series, online, and quite possibly within the school is likely to follow quite soon, but while I’m finishing things off, let me put this first on of the series out there as a taster

A flying start – migrating into the new school year

It might not actually quite be the start of the school year anymore, but it is in its way a flying start. 

The end of school clear out inevitably means empty display spaces come the start of the new school.  This year I decided to make an immediate splash in the biggest space in the school with rapidly made charcoal drawings of birds made by the fourteen-year-olds I teach.

Now as we head into the autumn season of migration in the bird world, it seems appropriate to share the result online.  It’s not an easy display to photograph well, but in real life the transparency of the paper and the darkness of the images combine for ever changing results throughout the day as the light outside changes.

Drawing on/for memories

I ended the last school year making a series of drawings of the school building where I work.  The idea was to make a series of images that may turn out to be useful for the forthcoming year, a vague plan I have for a series of lessons.  As it turned out the series of three drawings became combined to make a card I gave to a few departing colleagues as a memory of what they are leaving behind as they move on to other things……(any colleagues who have moved on to other things, and I didn’t get as far as dropping a card in your pigeon hole, if you’d like one let me know, I’d be more than happy to send one through….pure disorganisation at the end of the year!)  The fact that our school will be celebrating its 75th anniversary gives the ink and wash drawings an extra meaning perhaps.

I’ve subsequently spent the summer holidays travelling around Orkney, the island group between the Scottish mainland and Shetland.  Here too I have spent my time recording, documenting, and committing to memory the world around me in an extensive series of watercolours and drawings.  The activity makes me look hard, experiment a bit with what I can achieve on a small page of my notebook with a very limited set of artistic tools.  It is a good exercise, but above all, it is a fantastic way to record the experience of travel and to be able to return to it in the future.

Its a simple idea…..using photopea.com to look at colour and tone

Getting children to understand a bit about how areas of tone and colour can work to create form is a central task for most of those working in art education. The pupils generally get the idea of how line has a part to play rather quicker than these other two might combine to occupy the areas between the drawn line.

Also increasingly central to activities, at least in my art room, is how digital tools can also have a part to play and can be combined with more traditional approaches.

The following short assignment played very much into these areas, focusing on how form can be created using surfaces of colour, colour mixing and becoming familiar with how a few digitally editing tools can be used.  Those tools can be found in most editing software, and we were using the excellent (and free!) open source software offered on the photopea.com website.

The contextual background for the project that I did with my class of 12-13 year olds was transcriptions in art.  We had looked at a variety of artists’ work, but had paid particular attention to Velazquez Las Meninas and Picasso’s numerous interpretations of it.

Our focus was subsequently on the work of Vermeer for our own remakes.  The working process was reasonably simple and worked as follows:

• Import the image that you want to remake into Photopea.com
• Create a new layer above the image
• Look carefully at the image and try to identify areas of colour that whilst not being identical are at least very similar
• Use a selection lasso to trace round the area
• Sample the ‘average’ colour in the selected area and fill the whole area with just that colour
• Then proceed onto the next area

The pupils find this quite fascinating to do and work in an increasingly focused way, gradually building up their own image.  The result look a little like vector drawings that might have been created using a inbuilt filter, but it is very much a question of look, analyse and then carry out the digital steps.

For a group of 12-13 year olds the results have been excellent and has resulted in a feeling of considerable pride in the group.

The second phase was to use carbon paper to transfer the ‘vector’ drawing structure onto paper and then to paint or colour (using coloured pencils) the resulting simplified linear drawing.  At this point it becomes very much a colour mixing exercise where the subtleties of the digital image are transferred into a handmade version.

This part of the project is still at a relatively early stage, but the signs are good for some well made results.  But of course the real proof of the pudding will be in seeing whether pupils are able to take the lessons learning into future work, but hopefully without the digital step always having to be used.

Below is a link to a short PDF booklet that explains how the part of the project done using photopea.com works. It is written about portraits, but the principle and process is the same.

photopea-portraitsDownload

A classic poem in a CLIL context in the art room

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

Combing content and language in the learning process

For a while now monsters of one kind or another have been a feature of the lessons that I give to my groups of twelve-year-old pupils.  We’ve done various drawing assignments, made clay gargoyles, and dipped into art history by looking at the work of the likes of Hieronymus Bosch.

With these classes, being bilingual learners (Dutch children, being taught across their timetable in English in order to super-charge their acquisition of the English language), I am always looking for ways of enriching the practical lessons with elements of language beyond simply using it for instruction.  For example, recently I have had the class writing haikus that were inspired by the clay heads that we made together.

This year though I decided to branch out in a slightly different direction and make use of Lewis Carroll’s poem The Jabberwocky.  The monsters connection was obvious, but how to work with it with these children who are only eight months into their experience of bilingual education was the question.  Would they be ready to deal with this curious piece of literature?

I needn’t have worried; they were up to it.  When I asked them to read the poem for themselves and underline all the nonsense words, they were able to complete this first challenge without any problem at all, their vocabulary being sufficiently developed to spot the words in amongst the text.

Next, we spent time thinking of alternative words that could be used to replace the nonsense in the middle section of the poem.  Again, no real problem.  An occasional grammatical error or slip in the spelling perhaps, but they were definitely onto it, and understanding the intention completely.

The fun and laughter really started when I asked them to come up with their own nonsense words for the first and last verse.  At this point I wondered if the imaginary words they created might end up having an English or a Dutch feel to them.  It was of course all nonsense……but to me, the words that they were coming up with did have a distinctly English twang to it and they generally nestled perfectly well into the context of Carroll’s poem.

The link below allows you to download a step by step guide to the language part of the lesson.

jabberwocky-lesson planDownload

With this language component of the lesson series complete, we moved on with enthusiasm to work on a more than five-meter-long group drawing of our own Jabberwocky.  The result of the drawing project can be seen here, but how exactly we arrived at the composition and in what order we did things, are details I’ll save for another post.

The results of a stay at home Christmas

It was a rather static Christmas break. For the second year in succession no trip over to England. But the result was more studio time.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve regularly posted my experiments with lino-cutting. It’s been generally a fringe activity to the paintings I make, but for now at least the resulting work seems to be the leading factor and taking me towards the next round of paintings. Time will tell, but the prints and collages are offering interesting possibilities to explore.

As ever the themes relate to manipulated landscapes, geometry and the geometry that is found in the landscape itself……..and there is plenty of that in the Dutch landscape.

Can’t see the trees for the drawings – the start of the school year

All the work was actually done at the end of the previous school year.  In fact, a significant part was put in place during the tail end of the last lockdown that we had in schools here in the Netherlands back in the spring as this previous post documents:

Preparatory tree project work

But once back in school, with whole classes back together, what started as a walk in the countryside and photographic assignment, could take on a more ambitious drawing and painting character.

The idea was relatively simple. I wanted, after months of disruption and children following my lessons on their laptops and iPads at home to do a fairly loose group project that would deliver a result that was significantly bigger than the individual parts.  It was also obliquely connected to the Surrealist’s Exquisite Corpse drawing game where elements of drawing connect vertically without one part actually being made with the intention that it should seamlessly connect.

Our ‘corpses’ weren’t to me figures, but trees. Linked together by a vertical trunk that ran through the drawing.  The pupils had spent time outside looking at trees and photographing them.  We had made small digital collages connecting various sections of diverse trees into an arrangement that hinted at where we were going.

But still, the greatest challenge was to get the pupils (14-15 years old) to loosen up a bit and dare to start on the relatively large-scale drawings I was asking them to make.  To help reach the point where we got quite high contrast drawings there was really only one material to use and that was charcoal.

After a few nervous minutes at the beginning the class soon got into it.  I kept hammering on about daring to draw and being a bit aggressive in their mark-making.  Also, I kept again and again repeating to make sure that they got different scales of mark in the drawings, from the thick and lumpy trunks to the lace-like finest twigs and everything in-between.  We used the photographs made earlier as a reference point to make sure that nobody slipped into the ways of drawing trees that they may have used when they were at primary school.

Charcoal delivers fast results, and it was very quickly clear that the drawings that were being made have qualities that were going to mean that my hopes to make a larger group display of them was likely to be a possibility. 

The speed of the drawing process meant that in subsequent lessons we moved onto similar work, but this time drawn out in paint.  The pupils were working with a freedom that I rarely see, not just from the ‘artists’ of the class, but pretty much right across the room.

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The resulting work now hangs in the hall at the main entrance to the school, backlit from the light outside and against a backdrop of real trees.

Reverse Perspective 2

Two years ago I wrote a couple of posts about a drawing project that I had done with groups of 12 year olds using a technique where the rules of perspective are flipped around and the paper used is folded a little to produce surprising illusionistic results.  The original posts can be found here:

Reverse Perspective LINK 1

Reverse Perspective LINK 2

Since then two things have happened.  Firstly, the posts have gone all over the place, I discover then time and again online.  The idea certainly seemed to catch the attention of many involved in art and education.  And secondly I have been playing with the ideas for other variations using the techniques involved. 

Just under a year ago I finally had the new version ready to try in class, but during that very same week a lockdown arrived and I just couldn’t see how the complexities of the assignment could be made to work in an online/do it at home sort of a lesson.  As a result I moved on to other plans. 

During the early summer though, we were back at school and it was time to try again.  Like the first version the drawing makes use of essentially a form of one-point perspective drawing and a little paper folding.  The construction and drawing involved is perhaps just a little easier this time round and the results slightly different.

Reverse perspective2 PDF template to printDownload

This PDF offers a short cut to the drawing that is needed and can be printed out or redrawn by pupils (my preferred way) during the lesson.  The two small dots are the vanishing points that need to be used for the drawing of objects on the opposite facing wall.  The areas shaded blue ultimately need to be cut away before the folding of the paper can be completed and the two tabs glued behind to create the three dimensional construction.

Like with the original version the best illusionistic effect of the results are achieved when making a film of the resulting work.  For a next time, (as always you learn things as you go along!) I’ll be offering more guidance on how to draw tiled floors so that they fit more convincingly into the illusion.  You live and learn!!