Value Drawing...Owls

Isn't it just that way?  I went looking photos of the owl drawings my third graders did as a practice for the printmaking project below and couldn't find them.  That's because I was so blown away by the results that I forgot to photograph them.  Boo-hoo.  I guess I'll get to that later this week because their little practice sketches spontaneously turned into a 45 minute intense value drawing episode.  You could hear a pin drop. Naturally I let them go with it and then ran right over to sixth grade and repeated the lesson with my older artists, because I'll do anything to engage kids deeply with drawing.  Here are the few sixth grade value drawings that were completed last week.  Others are still in progress.

Scratch Art Owls

Grades 3, 4, and 5 have been working on Scratch Art this month. Here is some fifth grade work that turned out really well.  We made our own rainbow scratch boards for this project and reviewed the colors of the spectrum in proper sequence then used crayon to lay our base layer down in an interesting pattern.  Black oil pastel was used to cover the crayon and a rough draft design was created from reference photos.

When students were happy with their design the transferred it to the scratch board by laying the sketch on top of the scratch board and going over their lines with a pencil.  The faint transfer lines were etched into the scratch board with the end of a Popsicle stick and patterns were added.  

Owl Art

I walked into the three/four combined classroom at Readsboro Elementary to find students hard at work dissecting owl pellets. It was amazing to see all the little bits and pieces they contained. Students were collecting the little bones with the goal of comparing them to a chart of a mouse skeleton in an attempt to classify them. They found some pretty amazing insect exoskeletons, too.
Next thing we knew we were back in the art room drawing owls. I love how the details that they remembered from their unit on owls turned up in their artwork. Notice the heart-shaped faces of the snowy owls above.
I got them started by doing a guided drawing of a basic owl. There are many ways of doing it, but we started with the eyes and beek, drew a circle or oval for the head, added ears, then the sides of the body, the feet, branch, and tail. Then we added wings and details on the face and belly. I talked a little about symmetry in patterning their owl and they took off. It helped to have practiced patterns before we started the owl project.