“A profile is never motionless before our eyes,
but it constantly appears and disappears.”
—Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting
Lynda Lord
The idea for this art lesson
grew out of watching the
lively actions of my fourth
grade students. Since drawing is my first love, I am always
looking for new ways to teach it.
This time, instead of setting up a
still life, I decided to teach students
how to capture their actions on
paper.
in a circle to provide an area in
the middle where students would
pose. Each student was aware that
although they were motionless, the
action would be obvious: standing, bending, dancing, reaching,
or twisting. If a pose would take a
student off balance, we used a chair
as a counterbalance. Students were
allowed to use props to help them
in their poses,
although
drawing the
prop was not
required.
Drawings
started out taking thirty seconds.
This short time was set for students to experience how quickly
one drawing could be completed.
It also helped those students who
Capturing
MOVEMENT
tended
draw a f
lines an
then era
and cor
They be
to realize that
the short time went hand-in-hand
with making many quickly drawn,
sketchy lines. As students pro-
gressed with
their drawing
techniques,
they learned
to draw in less
time and grad-
uated from pencil to charcoal. They
had to complete ten pages of poses
in their sketchbooks, each with as
many poses as a page would hold.
Gesture Drawing
We began by looking at the gesture
drawings of Degas, Daumier, and
Toulouse-Lautrec. We compared
the use of contour lines—a continuous line following the edge of
images—to gesture drawing, which
utilizes quickly drawn lines to capture various movements of people
and animals.
Students were given warm-up
drawing exercises to help them
create loosely drawn spirals. They
practiced with soft pencils until
they could control the size, movement, and direction of the spirals
on their papers. When control of the
spirals became consistent, we began
to focus on drawing the human
figure. We discussed the human
body, studied the relationship of
body parts to the torso, the length
of the arms and legs, and discussed
the way the head and neck would be
positioned in certain poses.
Each student participated in providing a pose for the class to draw.
The tables and chairs were set up
Instead of setting up a still life,
I decided to teach students how
to capture their actions on paper.
