SchoolArts - April 2012

how Native Americans and colonists often lived side-by-side and shared ideas and goods.

Starting with Printmaking Students each chose one type of colonial building and, using photos as examples, drew sketches on 4 x 5" ( 10 x 12. 5 cm) paper. They re-drew the sketches onto 4 x 5" Styrofoam printmaking plates. I encouraged them to experiment with patterns to show the textures of building materials, such as dots for stone or wavy lines for logs. I warned that tiny details would not show up after printing.

to go along with their drawings. Some
students created villages or cities with
a variety of buildings and people going
about daily business. Others decided
to make farms
full of animals
and crops. A few
even illustrated
events from the
Revolutionary
War, with their
buildings and
landscape as the
backdrop. To help, I made handouts
showing photos of wagons, clothing,
plows, looms, and farm animals.
ferent colors are built up over each
other. I referred to the color wheel
and reminded students about how to
create secondary and tertiary colors.
Students found
overlapping
created intrigu-
ing effects for
sunsets, clouds,
water, fields,
clothing, and
even animal
fur.
After working hard on printmak-
ing, drawing, and using new color con-
cepts, students were excited to have
incorporated their knowledge of early
America into a visual story. In addi-
tion, colonial architecture came alive
as students learned how and why cer-
tain buildings were made and gained
a deeper understanding of the people
who built and lived in them.
Colonial architecture came alive
as students learned how and
why certain buildings were
made and gained a deeper
understanding of the people
who built and lived in them.

Lindsay Browning, grade five.

Anna Wilson, grade five.

I demonstrated the printmaking process using a brayer, brown ink, and a Styrofoam plate. Students had to create two identical prints from their plate, each with clear white lines and solid (not “snowy”) areas of ink. When the prints were dry, students carefully cut out their two buildings and used a glue stick to attach them to a large sheet of drawing paper.

Moving to Narrative Drawings
Students designed scenes in pencil,
using their two prints as a basis. I
encouraged them to imagine a story
When the narrative drawings
were complete, I demonstrated two
advanced crayon techniques: shading
and overlapping. In shading, black (or
another dark color) is lightly applied
over another color. This works great
for shadows and helps give objects a
three-dimensional look. I told stu-
dents to think about where their light
source (sun, moon, lantern, etc.) would
be before they started, and the shadow
would always move away from it.