It’s all in the detail
This week at the Art Room we continued our exploration of drawing by focusing on texture.
Using our understanding of line and the different ways we might make a mark with our pencil or brush, we built on last week’s discoveries by investigating how we might represent different types of materials or textures in our artwork.
Our preschool artists used cut out shapes and collaged materials to build texture into their wonderfully smiley portrait heads. Each child mixed their own paint shades to personalise their designs and added string, fabric and tissue paper to represent curls, waves and strands of hair that they could see from their reflections in a mirror. The final group of cheerful expressions captured the joy in the room perfectly!
After school, the children warmed up their creative juices by looking carefully at the textures of different reference images and objects and practiced drawing woodgrain, stone, wool, sand, fabric and fur. It was great to hear the children chatting about the effects they created and the different methods they preferred, be that repeating straight lines for hatching, circular motions to produce a scribbly effect, or stippling and creating darker shades by placing tens of tiny dots close together on their practice sheets.
Our oldest artists were fabulous at attempting our next challenge, which was to produce a sketch of a random object, selected blind by lucky dip, by using their sense of touch. Tempting as it was, we were so impressed that the children chose not to peek at the item they selected and held out of sight under the table and instead used their fingers to explore how the object felt. Everyone did an amazing job at estimating the size and shape of their item and took great care to sense the details and textures that made it unique. The resulting drawings were incredibly detailed and the smooth shiny surface of a lightbulb, the knobbly grooves on a seashell or the fluffy pile of a little soft toy were accurately represented.
We completed our afterschool classes with a scraperboard activity and asked the children to arrange their own mini still-life of cut pieces of citrus fruits from which to work. Using a cocktail stick to carefully scrape lines from the black painted surface of the scraperboard to reveal colourful marks below, everyone did a great job drawing out the shapes and textures they could see before them. By using this less familiar method of recording their image, the children had to think carefully about how they might represent the shiny segments of orange flesh, the spongy lines of pith and the dimpled skin of a lemon without the usual sunny shades of colouring pencils or paint. It was great to see them all adopt careful observation and their understanding of mark-making and line to build a drawing from the details that captured their attention and the textures that appealed most to them.
We particularly loved how the children took their time with each activity we shared this week. By slowing themselves down, they enjoyed the calming process of making their art as much, if not more, than the finished piece itself. By paying close attention to the little details in the world around us, it was great to see curiosity, observation and play go hand in hand.
Next time we will use these skills of observation to take our imagination outside to see where it will fly!
