For Non-specialist Teachers and Parents With Limited Resources To Afford & Effect Delivery Of Aspects Of KS2/3 Art.
This file is intended as one starting point for non-specialist teachers and parents who need to extend all children’s natural abilities in Art. It should be backed up with visits to your local library and your nearest Art Gallery. This is NOT a 'How To Do It' but more of a 'You Can Do It - Your Way'
KEY WORDS
Tone, Proportion, Illusion, Originality, Cartoon, Tactile Experience, Design, Artefact, 2D, Structure, Mobiles, 3D, Model, Artist, Colour, Brightness, Dullness, Perspective, Print.
TONE ~ Tone refers to darkness and lightness, black, white or grey.
PROPORTION ~ Proportion refers to the relative shape and size of one thing to another.
ILLUSION ~ Something which appears to be there but isn’t really there.
ARTEFACT ~ A work of art, such as a drawing, painting, print or sculpture, which has been created by an artist.
2D ~ Two Dimensional ~ Something which is flat, such as a sheet of paper, which has no real depth when the proportion of its thickness is compared to its length or width. Flat things are said to have shape but no form.
ORIGINALITY ~ Something which isn’t copied, even though it may or may not have been influenced by something else.
CARTOON ~ A sketch which is intended to be developed at a later date as a different kind of artwork.
TACTILE EXPERIENCE ~ The natural urge of children and artists to understand something better, to explore and examine by touching.
DESIGN ~ Simply the process of developing something new - we all do it at different stages in our lives, starting at birth with the tactile games we invent with our mouths.
STRUCTURE ~ Something which has been built with some design and purpose.
MOBILES ~ Artefacts which are hung (usually from a ceiling) to move in the air.
3D ~ Three Dimensional ~ Something which has a considerable depth (proportional to its height and width) occupies space and can often stand up without support. For example, a flat piece of paper can be folded to stand up on its edge. The resulting structure would occupy space and would no longer be 2D or flat. The Japanese have given the world an art form called ORIGAMI, which is the art of paper folding to make 3D forms (not shapes) such as birds and animals, which stand on their own or can be suspended as a mobile to occupy space. Children respond well to pictures of these ‘sculptures’ and better still to samples which are provided for them. From folding and decorating their own simple shapes, children can be shown how to slot pieces of pre-cut corrugated card (from boxes) together (like leggo) to form large 3D structures. Children very quickly get ambitious to cut their own shapes and invent their own 3D structures and suitable tools and used boxes should be at hand. Perhaps a look at a book on the sculptures of Naum Gabo and the Constructivists might prove inspiring and later a visit to see such sculptures at the Tate Gallery in London.
MODEL ~ Something which represents something else, refining, fixing or focusing upon certain characteristics so that they can be studied more conveniently in isolation.
ARTIST ~ Any person who creates original 2D and/or 3D artefacts ~ especially children.
COLOUR ~ Refers to the seven basic pigments used by artists. The three Primary Colours ~ Red, Blue and Yellow, from which all other colours are made, the three Secondary Colours ~ Green, Purple and Orange (made by mixing two primaries) and the Tertiary Colour brown, a dull colour which is made from mixing the three primaries.
BRIGHTNESS ~ The total absence of any one of the three primaries in any colour creates a bright colour. When trying to mix a bright orange it is important to keep blue out of the mixture. If there is blue already present within the two primaries being used to mix orange (red and yellow), the resulting orange will be dull or ‘dirty’ (tending towards a rusty brown). It is impossible to mix a bright orange using either a lemon yellow or crimson as both these primaries already contain some blue. To mix a bright orange, reds and yellows without blue should be chosen, such as brilliant yellow or flame red. Initially, to avoid children ending up with muddy catastrophes, help them to avoid mixing the three primary colours all at once by allowing them to have only two primary colours at a time. Leave paint to dry on their work in progress and then replace one of the two primaries, with the third primary. Leave the new colours to dry and provide children with their final primary colour pairing.
DULLNESS ~ The presence of all three primaries in any colour will make that colour tend towards brown, the dullest (dirtiest?) colour. That’s why the water in the jug always ends up brown - because all three primary colours are at some time washed off the brush into the jug. To deliberately create a dull secondary colour (Autumn colours for example) a small amount of the third primary should be added to the mixture of two primaries. To dull a green add red, to dull an orange add blue, to dull a purple add yellow. This works in reverse: to dull a bright yellow into a soft gold, mix in a small amount of purple; to dull a loud, glowing green to a calm, quiet pasture, mix in a small amount of red; to dull a summer blue sky into a twilight or winter sky, mix in a small amount of orange.
PERSPECTIVE ~ Perspective is the illusion of depth on a flat surface
PRINT ~ To print is to pick up a spread medium, such as ink, from one surface and to transfer that medium, as it is applied to the pick-up surface, to another surface. The resulting imprint will be the reverse of that on the pick up tool. In its simplest form, a textured sponge dabbed into a palette of nearly dry paint, will leave a reverse impression of the sponge surface when it is pressed (printed) onto paper. If stencils are cut using a thicker paper, the sponge can be dabbed (or ‘printed’) over the spaces in the stencils onto the artwork below, leaving the shaped edge of the stencil as part of the printed design. Washing up liquid can be added into water-based paints or inks, to thicken them and to prevent them from drying too quickly. Paint which is too thin or wet will not 'print' easily.
I try to avoid words like draw and paint as children often have preconceived ideas and expectations in these areas. Children sometimes lack confidence that they can draw or paint in the way they believe that other people expect them to draw and paint.... so they give up. Children love playing. The successful non-specialist teacher and parent will have no difficulty in getting children to play or ‘mess about’ with lumps of charcoal, cardboard boxes, sponges and ready mixed colours. The difficulty will be in setting and keeping direction to the play. Try to avoid getting the children to produce ‘real’ art. There’s no such thing: all art is magic and the consequence of controlled play and discovery. Remember that their creations are far more real to them than the polished works we lock inside remote places.
TONE
Above is a tonal range, which moves from white through grey to black. Notice how I have described the range as any person in the western world would describe it - from left to right. That is how we are taught to read and write and where to start on a sheet of paper when we put pencil to paper. These are conventions which are necessary stepping stones for making educational progress in the western world. Unfortunately, this particular convention inhibits creative drawing. Any western child who has been taught to write, will pick up a pencil and think of making a line not a tone and think of starting his or her drawing from the left. Try it with your children. Get them to trace a black and white photograph with a 3B pencil. I bet they don't shade light and dark , pressing softly and harder over the different tonal densities. My guess is that they will just outline each shape, starting at the top left of the photograph. Convention creates inhibitions within artists.
That’s why I avoid words like drawing and delay the use of pencils until a child is able to see another potential way of making marks on paper besides making formal lines from left to right. By far the best tonal medium to introduce to a child for the first time is charcoal - the lumpier the better. If you’ve made your own from willow twigs as part of an earlier science or history project, so much the better.
Read your children a poem and ask them to make the images that the poem conjured, using lumps of charcoal on white newsprint which you may have scrounged as an end roll from your local newspaper publisher. Play them some dramatic music, Stravinsky’s stormy The Rite Of Spring perhaps. Ask them to keep in mind the images from the poem and ask how the music changes those images. Then ask them to make new pictures with their charcoal as you play the music again. The drama will unfold before you and little conventional line drawing will be in evidence. Ask your children to further explore the tonal possibilities of charcoal and to fit tonal ranges into linear shapes. Very soon they will want to get rid of the lines and you can give them chalk to obscure them.
Some bright spark will start mixing the charcoal with the chalk (its called playing) and you’ve opened a can of worms - mmm...that would make a nice imaginative drawing, shiny tin and shiny, dark, slimy worms. And more ideas will flow from them. Resist the temptation to show them how. They will learn from each other and your attempts will probably resort back to conventions - you haven’t had the advantage that you’re giving them. Give them some thicker cartridge paper so that they can rub and mix harder and get them to further experiment with different coloured paper backgrounds. Let them cut around their tonal work so that they actually start outline drawing with a pair of scissors. Let them paste these cutouts to overlap each other on coloured backgrounds. Let them look around the room for shiny shadowy things (which you have previously provided of course) and get them to weave dramatic images of these things and invent their own stories and shiny shadowy poems, drawing from memory, imagination and experience. When work gets dusty, encourage children to hold the work away from them and to tap it on the back for the dust to fall off. Don't let children blow the dust away (into the air and other children's lungs). A cheap hairspray makes a good fixative - but make sure it's ozone friendly!
When you judge that children have learned their own way to draw and can throw away the crutch of convention (it could be hours, weeks or months for some) give them a 3B pencil and please don’t expect them to write with it. Allow them to look at black and white photographs and to take from them what they can use not copy. Better still, get them to take and use their own black and white photos. Introduce them to the tonal drawings of Leonardo da Vinci or any other Renaissance artist, especially Raphael, Albrecht Durer and later the tonal drawings of Caravaggio and to guess if they can work out how these artists used their materials. Perhaps mention that these men were also scientists who were very interested in the way that light fell on objects and wrote notes and conducted experiments with candles and mirrors. Find a book containing the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci or better still, visit The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, W1 (Tel: 0171 930 4832) to see the original 'cartoons'.
Now try similar experiments with black and white ink and paint and sponges, straws and diffusers. Don’t give them brushes until the time is right for them to start daubing and not drawing with them. Mention that Leonardo used to throw rags filled with paint at blank walls and urged his young apprentices to develop their imaginations by turning the splattered shapes into recognizable forms. Jackson Pollock was way behind the times, but in fairness, like Turner and the Impressionists (especially Claude Monet) he was concerned for media for its own sake and not merely for what it represented.
PROPORTION, ILLUSION, TACTILE EXPERIENCE & ORIGINALITY
Proportion is an essential building block in mathematics and science. Perhaps in conjunction with a mathematics/science project, ask your children to make outline (charcoal) drawings of each other on large sheets of white newsprint paper. The silhouettes can be filled in for further tonal work if you were prepared to let your children experiment with light and shadow (torches or floodlights in a dark room, looking at folds and bumpy bits that catch the light) but they can simply be used on the walls as an aid to measurement. Using simple mathematics, scaled drawings can then be made of the originals. A simple trick for adjusting scale is to draw a rectangle around a shape and join two corners of that rectangle with a diagonal. Any smaller rectangle drawn to use the same diagonal will be proportional to the original rectangle. Draw proportional grids over the two rectangles and a simple shape transfer, square by square, is much easier. Artists have used this technique to scale up their 'cartoons' (sketches) for centuries.
Scaled drawings can be cut out in corrugated box card and ‘assembled’ to make sculptural, free standing groups, following some experiments into the technology of slotting flat shapes together. A reference to Auguste Rodin’s 'Burghers Of Calais' and other, more local civic sculptures of groups of people, might inspire more creative endeavour. Why not take your children in search of such sculpture in town centres or parks? (But know where to find them first.)
The large drawings can be ‘dissected’ to judge the relative sizes of arms, legs, head and torso and corrugated cardboard bits reassembled to create free standing (sitting or crawling) cardboard sculptures.
Now is the time to look at the way (and to ask why) different civilizations have looked at and represented the human form - from Peru to Siam. Tonal drawings can be made of the angular forms that children assemble and without misgivings your children will proceed naturally to making direct tonal studies of each other, linking them to what they learn from other cultures.
Using this simple ‘modelling’ approach to their environment, children can be shown how to understand and use the proportions of anything in their environment and to manipulate their models to create imaginative situations by changing the scale of things. Children are very appreciative when shown the works of Surrealist artists who have experimented with the scale and context of their environment in creating their own private worlds of fantasy and imagination. The work of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte is most suitable. The work of Maurit Cornelius Escher is also worth investigating. With the advent of computer graphics, such surrealist re-adjustment of our world abounds in television advertising and feature films. Ask children to jot down these examples as they recognise them - it makes watching television much more fun. They can record images on VHS tape, freeze them and use them. Children can be encouraged to use their toy dinosaurs to make tonal compositions wherein their own room can become a Jurassic Park, to say nothing of the scan, clip, copy and paste techniques to which many children are now becoming familiar through the personal computer. The strait-jacket of convention goes out the window (at last). Artists are not born of convention.
If clay or plasticine is available, children can mould their own scale models of the things that interest them and thereby in a more familiar, tactile manner, build their understanding of the world from touch to touch.
DESIGN
From modelling, design is but a short step in either direction, for who can say which comes first. The baby who explores a smooth plastic shape whilst teething is creating a model of that shape in his or her mind, whilst that mind develops pathways to solving the problem of getting a more satisfying bite. At any time during Key Stage Two, children can be encouraged to record their surroundings in words, pictures and diagrams and to rearrange these findings for fun. More often than not the new arrangements will result in a collision of laughter, but practise will bring perception and will often result in insight to useful combinations. Tchaikovsky said that genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, but he must have had fun perspiring. We must encourage our children to be as keen to play and we must be as resigned to accepting that most of that investment in play will not bear the expected fruit. If it isn’t fun, then we should not even expect the perspiration.
An important start in most design work is to identify a problem to solve. If the child is interested, he or she will invest with amazing energy and enthusiasm. The first problem is to find what interests the child and to encourage that child that he or she can achieve, with some effort, a small but satisfying improvement, in one form or another, to his or her enjoyment of that interest. It is gratifying to note that most children do not know all the things that interest them until a teacher or parent properly introduces them. A problem arises when some children are interested by something and others are not. It is important then to have different interests, possibly with related links, ‘on the boil’.
Having identified interests, encourage and show the child how to collect information from diverse sources relating to those interests. This will require some previous effort on your part, with a visit to your local library probably being your first option. There can be no further progress without that information. You've probably got a link to the Internet (this file was found at http://users.aol.com/GOWERPICS/ART.html ) so why not 'keyword' some children's interests into a few search engines. The process of collecting information takes time and other projects should be ‘on the boil’ as that process continues. Encouraging the child to play with that information, reproducing it in different forms and combining different elements of it, sometimes in absurd juxtapositions, will not be a problem. Do not force a deadline but keep several different interests simmering, leaving them and returning to them in different ways as you and the child see fit. Insight to a successful solution brings its own impetus to each deadline.
Remember that each child is an individual, with his or her own interests, that may also coincide with another child’s interests. Children should be encouraged to make several different partnerships where these interests overlap and to work with their appropriate partner when the mood takes them. Children will inevitably be drawn into groups when interests take hold - even children who expressed totally different interests initially. Ideas will bounce around and children will be keen to try one daft thing after another as long as it’s fun. And then someone, maybe even you, because you’re part of everyone’s group, will get a bright idea that seems to address the original problem. Time to give it a go, try it out and maybe have another go. But that’s design and any other way just doesn’t work. It’s the way we humans live our lives.
FROM ARTEFACTS TO ARTISTS
In Art, the design process will lead naturally to the production of artefacts. Although an end in themselves, artefacts are also starting points - especially other people’s artefacts. Slavish copying for its own sake should not be encouraged, but to copy an artist’s technique, subject matter, style or media in order to gain an insight that can be ‘brought aboard’ and re-used to advantage in a very personal way, is the way in which we humans operate. We see something, we like it, we find out more about it and we re-create it to suit our own needs. At its most base level it is merely ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. The process is called sustained improvisation and without it we would all still be riding horses and carts, or more likely, some of us would be riding and most of us would be walking.
Children must be encouraged to evaluate the things that they have around them which make their lives better and worse. They must be encouraged to look at and evaluate the works of other civilisations, take on board anything useful and learn from history’s mistakes. Otherwise the future is doomed to repeat them. Visits to a local art gallery and museum are essential in order to look first hand at revered artefacts and to question why they are held in such esteem. Each visit should be seen as a useful opportunity to collect much needed valuable information about certain interests. If a child is only interested in motor bikes, then he or she may be persuaded to look at the technology of the cart, the spoked wheel and its successor in the motorbike, with a view to looking at the future and modern materials and lighter, stronger, aerodynamic wheels for motorbikes. It has been known that designers have often looked back in time for answers to current problems. You might just be able to visualise that child’s tonal designs for his or her futuristic bike.
With regard to teaching art, the path to success is not in showing children the way that you know how to draw and paint, it is in being able to find links that might interest your children and in helping your children to pursue these links in their own ways. But isn’t that the art of being a parent or teacher anyway, no matter what?
If teaching art is about anything, it’s about sharpening perceptions, dispelling prejudices and washing away all preconceptions. Objectivity is the goal, but whose objectivity - not the art teacher’s - that’s for sure! When asking people to be objective, we present the facts to them and ask them to judge for themselves. We don’t ask them to see it our way. Bertrand Russell said that in normal human beings, the greater part of the information that enters the brain, enters via the eyes, more than that which enters the brain via, touch, smell, taste and sound put together. Our thinking depends on our senses. What a responsibility for the humble art teacher to assume? The art teacher must be especially careful that his or her children do not end up seeing the world through his or her eyes. If our brains depend on our senses to receive information, if that information is inaccurate or distorted, is our thinking inaccurate or distorted? Art teachers can sharpen senses and open minds, but they must guard against imposing their own objectivity and ways of seeing and interpreting, upon children. Children must be allowed to see for themselves, to respond in their own ways and to think for themselves. Education is about making informed choices, building confidences and learning by mistakes - not copying!
COLOUR
Life without colour would be drab. It is all around us and yet we take it for granted. Would the television watchers amongst us (including me) go back to a black and white television set now? Opening young eyes and minds to the colours which have always been all around them, is the greatest ‘buzz’ that an art teacher can get. Getting children to see and understand and apply with effect, the simple rules for appreciating and mixing bright and dull colours, is magic. In the colour triangle below, colour opposites can be seen at the end of each line.
Colour Opposites
PRIMARY SECONDARY
RED + GREEN
BLUE + ORANGE
YELLOW + PURPLE
A pair of colour opposites consists of one primary and one secondary colour, which, when mixed together, always make Brown.
Brown is a tertiary colour and contains all three primaries, Red, Blue and Yellow.
When a pair of colour opposites are placed next to each other, they make each other seem brighter. The colours below are the same six colours. The Red seems brighter surrounded by Green than the Red surrounded by Orange - but it is the same Red.
This effect can be seen in the works of some of the Impressionist and Post Impressionist painters. Vincent Van Goch uses a warm, purple-blue night sky against the warm glow of his yellow lighted night cafe and the resulting night picture is warm and bright - even though it is a night scene. He uses the colour opposites red and green to create a bright and warm picture in his billiard hall picture. Vincent Van Goch’s pictures are bright. Now you know why. Check it out and look for more examples of colour opposites being used for a bright effect, especially in the works of the Impressionists, including Claude Monet. Have you ever thought why nature puts red berries on green holly? Because nature wants birds to see the bright contrast of colour opposites and propagate the holly seeds. Where else is brightness valued and exaggerated? In the gold of crowns against the purple of royal gowns perhaps?
Children love looking for examples of colour opposites on Birthday cards, toys, sweets and other things designed to be bright to catch the eye. They love using this precious gem of information to make their own brightly titled pictures. Just think, no more unintentionally brown and yukky pictures on your walls. But some children can even appreciate the power that they have to create dull and moody pictures. By their careful mixing of colour opposites, they can create infinite varieties of tertiary colours which stop just short of being brown. By adding tones, children experiment easily with mixing flesh coloured tertiaries to match the colours and tones of their skin, with soft coloured veins and gentle shadows. This is an acquired skill and art history is full of examples of fine painters who do just that. These artists create magical effects. No need to give names.... just look in any good art book, but you might start with Holbein, Rubens or Francois Boucher. The works of portrait artists are especially worth investigating, especially Joshua Reynolds, Grant Wood and, for contrast and controversy, Francis Bacon. It really is much more fun finding your own examples, or letting children find them with you - especially if you are using the internet.
Armed with a sound appreciation of colour, no more “Miss, my purple turned out brown and you said that red and blue made purple!” Yes, but which red and blue? Not the ones that already contain yellow.
When purchasing paint, it is only really necessary to purchase 8 pigments - 2 kinds of blue (one tending almost imperceptibly towards turquoise, the other towards purple), two kinds of red (one flamey the other crimson) , two kinds of yellow (one lemon for bright greens, the other brilliant, gamboge or cadmium for bright oranges), black and white. Black and white are not colours: they are tones; but they are mixed with colour to lighten and darken - never to dull or brighten. Colours do that to themselves.
PERSPECTIVE
Children love magic almost as much as they love learning and playing new tricks . Year 6 pupils get a big thrill out of creating the illusion of depth on a flat surface, especially when they are given five different ways to achieve this and the freedom to explore new combinations of these perspectives.
OVERLAP PERSPECTIVE
Which shape is the furthest away? None of them. It’s an illusion. But the shape that looks like a square appears to be behind a shape which might be a triangle. There is certainly a circle in the composition. Were you tricked into believing that you really did see a square and a triangle?
SIZE PERSPECTIVE
Which shape appears to be furthest away? Number 3 of course. It really isn’t but because it’s drawn smaller it does look to be further away.
TONAL PERSPECTIVE
You’ve got the idea. Tone does add depth, transforming a shape into a form.... agreed? You should try this with other shapes. It’s fun.
LINEAR PERSPECTIVE
Each set of parallel lines in perspective will appear to meet at a vanishing point on the horizon (artist’s eye level). Vertical lines will remain parallel to the edge of the picture plane (the edge of the paper). This is really a KS3 concept but KS2 children will instantly recognise the principle when you mention Road Runner cartoons and railway tracks.
COLOUR PERSPECTIVE
Colours get duller (mix in a little of their opposite colour) and lighter (mix in white) in the distance. Go look outside now if you don’t believe me (if it’s still daytime of course).
Put all these illusions together and you’ve got some pretty powerful magic. Children love searching for these examples around them and sketching them into ideas books. The word sketchbook puts children off as it implies that they need to know how to sketch properly. There’s no such thing. If a sketch works, that is, if it retains an observation, memory or thought for later recall, then it is perfectly valid - no matter how technically perfect it is or is not. Art is not merely about technique and if a technique works for an individual, then he or she should not be encouraged to adopt a more conventional approach. Remember, Leonardo da Vinci used his sketchbooks to jot down ideas for 'cartoons', from which his apprentices made works of art for him to apply the finishing touches. Leonardo's ideas books are full of drawings which overlap each other and full of ideas on a single page which were put down at different times. Sometimes Leonardo would return to a page and superimpose an idea. Much of his architecture is based on his study of anatomy.
From their sketches and designs, children love 'printing' perspective pictures with sponges and cut stencils - especially directly onto walls where they can play tricks with the building's own perspective. Green fields and blue skies receding into the distance with magical forms at the end of a dark and once dismal corridor? Art should be used to enhance life and not forgotten and preserved in some musty museum.
As a non specialist ‘teaching’ art, you have an enormous advantage over art teachers. You stand innocent as a child before nature with no arrogance, preconceived conventions or great expectations about right and wrong in art. You will stand on the shoulders of giants with your children and see further and probably think better every day. Your own objectivity will grow alongside theirs and you will understand that they may not be doing it wrong, just doing it differently, in their own, original way. The wonderful thing about children is their resilience. No matter how much we superimpose other artists' ideas and tricks upon them, children continue to do things in the creatively unique, original and individually childish ways that best suit their needs.
Yours sincerely,
Vance Broad Principal, Mumbles Sailing School. SAILGOWER@aol.com
Head of Art and Design in four different types of secondary school at one time or another. So what do I know about KS2 that you don’t know already? Nothing. But I know that it’s wrong to try to teach children how to draw and paint ‘properly’.
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