Week 2 - Visual Arts

In the lecture this week we looked at the three stages of drawing that children go through – scribble, symbolism and realism. This was further explored through Marjorie and Brent Wilson’s graphic principles. It was fascinating to be provided with some guidelines by which we could more accurately assess the stage of development of our students.

At the beginning of our art workshop we presented our homework piece to the rest of the class.

The brief was to create a montage of our name using various found objects that represent various aspects of our personalities.

Here is my name montage.

J – I did a felt tip pen drawing of a microphone shaped in the letter ‘J’ because I perform as a vocalist in various bands.

E – I formed the letter ‘e’ by sticking together leaves that I found in my front yard because I grew up in the Blue                Mountains and I enjoy being amongst nature.

S – I created an s shape out of torn up sugar sachets because I have a sweet tooth!

S – This ‘s’ was made by sticking chili flakes onto the page in an s shape because I am a fan of spicy food.

E – I cut this ‘e’ shape out of my friends’ album launch flyer that I was performing at.

I really enjoyed creating my name montage as it gave me time to appreciate some of the things that I enjoy/are important to me and it was also a very good way to find out a little bit more about my classmates. It is definitely an activity that i would look to use in a classroom setting with my future students.

In the rest of the workshop we paired off and created a pencil drawing portrait of our partner. I was nervous about engaging in this activity, but after our teacher gave us a couple of simple instructions on how to accurately divide up our face so that features such as eyes and nose would be proportionate and accurately positioned I felt a lot better about the activity. It just goes to show how a bit of appropriate teacher scaffolding can provide students with the confidence to engage in previously daunting activities.