This is a great exercise for helping children to notice details and to articulate them in interesting ways.
We begin by exploring different ways to make marks: straight lines, curved or wavy lines, cross hatching, short dashes, dots, circles and mixtures of these. We talk about the type of textures they look like and explore situations we might use each in.
I then direct the children to look at the the objects on display that we are going to draw. On this day, we started by drawing rocks with interesting textures, then moved onto drawing pinecones. We talk for a moment about the details then invite the students to draw them. Students could choose from several drawing tools like pencils (lead, wax, charcoal) and a few pens. We lightly sketched the outer form, then began filling in areas of details.
We discuss light and shadow as we go along, noting in particular the shadow at the base of object. Students were given a white pastel at the end to add highlights if desired.
