Friday, December 19, 2014

Drawing Trees

At the elementary level, our drawings of trees often start out at looking a little bit like broccoli.  You know the kind... a trunk with a fuffy cloud-looking shape on top.  To help our first graders to (literally) see the forest for the trees, or better yet, to focus on a single tree, the students drew the trees outside our art room.  We dubbed our more realistic-looking trees "V" trees and studied how the trunk of a tree branched out into smaller trunks, how big branches branched out into medium branches which branched out to small branches.  A single trunk results in hundreds of "V"-shaped twigs at the top.
After sketching several trees in pencil, the first graders are coloring in their trees with crayon.  These drawings will get painted with a wash of black watercolor paint to create an image of a forest at night to prepare our papers for the next step of the project.

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