I decided to give my students a subject theme to choose from and thought food would be a good one. As a bell work activity, I had my students draw 5 different food items that they may use for our project. At this time, I did not explain what we would be doing so they weren't thinking too much about the end result. I then had them choose the one they felt looked the best/was their favorite and then they did a re-draw of this item making sure it had all of the necessary details.
We then moved onto some 12X18 newsprint scratch paper where they drew their food item 3 times fairly large. We discussed a balance of positive and negative space on the paper. After this step, they traced all pencil lines with sharpie. At this point we stopped and looked at the characteristics of Cubism and focused on Picasso. I showed a variety of his works but focused on his "3's", 3 Dancers, 3 Musicians, etc.
I had the students break up their drawing into 5-6 pieces using lines, making what I called puzzle pieces. I stressed that the pieces should be fairly large and limited the number because I knew some of my students would go crazy on this step which would make the rest of the project rather difficult. Students cut apart their puzzle pieces and created a new composition, considering a balance of positive and negative space, overlapping, and going off of the page.
Students then went to the windows and traced their composition onto new paper, making sure to not only copy the food images, but also the outlines of each puzzle piece.
Our final step was to add color. We discussed an analogous color scheme, choosing 3-4 colors next to each other on the color wheel to use for the objects. I had my students use oil pastels because they haven't used them much and they are fairly easy to blend, so I had them explore the concept of gradation. For the background we used the complement of the main color used for the objects, and added in a smaller analogous color scheme using that color.
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| Three Cherries |
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| Three Hamburgers |
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| Three Apples |
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| Three Cantaloupe Slices |
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| Three Hot Dogs |
These came out great! They could almost be a mesh of cubism and pop art, with all those colors and all that food!
ReplyDeleteI'm doing cubism self portraits with my high schoolers now. Cubism is so tough to teach! I can never really wrap my head around it. Some of my kids are doing great, while others...ehh.