Week I Drawing Assignment
Due: Week II at the beginning of drawing class
Technical: Getting to know your materials (2 hours)
This week the focus is on getting to know your materials in a playful way. You will be working with charcoal, chalk pastel, pencil, pen and ink, and either watercolor or prisma color colored pencils. In your nature journal, pencil, pen and ink, watercolor and prisma color will have fewer problems smearing.
This week, work on getting to know pen and ink and pencil. For each medium, fill three pages of your sketchbook experimenting with different kinds of marks you can make with the mediums. Then using your “L shapes” find a composition and try to reproduce it on a third page. Then fill three pages with some combination of pen and ink and pencil. Using your “L shapes, find a composition and try to reproduce it on a third page). Experiment with the drawing tape.
Expressive Assignment: Memory Place Map (3 hours)
In week two, one theme we are examining is what children learn from nature. In many cultural traditions, people pass along important cultural information by linking stories with place. In Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes the relationship between landscape and language among the Western Apache. In this culture, there is a tradition of “stalking with stories.” If a person breaks a taboo, then a parent, friend or elder might tell a story about what happened in a place to a person who broke the cultural rules. It is easier for a person to remember a moral lesson when it is linked to a place because passing by the place reminds them of the lesson. Places can also teach lessons. For example in Chapter 6 of Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv writes about how his experience building a tree house in nature taught him important skills. In other traditions, there are stories about what you can learn by observing animal and plant behavior (e.g. be as persistent as a woodpecker, watch out for people who behave like predators, slow down enough to watch a beautiful sunset).
In this assignment, in your nature journal, begin by making a list of specific places in nature (e.g. wilderness, backyard, vacant lot, park, farm) that have be important to you. For each place, make some notes about a significant event that happened there. Identify some important lessons you learned from the event. Choose one place/event that you would feel comfortable sharing with the class.
In your nature journal, brainstorm and make some sketches of alternative ways you could make a map of this significant place from your memory. This map image could be a literal map or made in some other imaginative way (e.g. in the shape of the main problem at the scene).
Make an image (at least 18” x 24”) that maps this memory of place. Because this is a large image, use a medium that is conducive to a large image such as charcoal or India ink and brush. Students beginning with charcoal for the first time should use this opportunity to develop confidence and skill with charcoal. If you have experience with other mediums or ways of working, feel free to use them. Use the Canson or Strathmore white drawing paper or paper of better quality.
