Student-directed vs. teacher-directed and choice vs. “cookie cutter projects” (I hate that phrase, it’s so annoying) are big discussions with art teachers online lately. This is an example of how teacher-directed projects (perspective and interior models) can include lot of student choice and opportunities for creativity.
When I went to the Art Institute of Chicago this Spring, I was lucky to be able to see the traveling van Gogh bedroom paintings exhibit. My friend Dawn told me that she used van Gogh’s bedroom paintings to study perspective and she had her students draw their own bedrooms using one-point perspective. I thought this was a great idea. I usually do a one-point perspective lesson with my 4th/5th grade classes.
First, I showed the students some photographs from the van Gogh bedroom exhibit using this presentation I made. (If you are reading from an email subscription or blog reader, you might need to pop on over to the actual blog post to see the presentation.) A few of the images I pulled from image searches about perspective.
[embeddoc url=”https://www.artisbasic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Bedrooms-and-Perspective-Powerpoint.pdf” download=”all”]
I demonstrated on my document camera how to draw a room in one-point perspective and I distributed various handouts and printed examples for the kids to reference.
My students drew one-point perspective bedrooms. They could choose to draw a Surreal bedroom (similar to these), their own bedroom or their dream bedrooms (similar to these.) My students’ bedrooms turned out wonderful, but I either forgot to take pictures or I misplaced the pictures, because unfortunately I can not find pictures of ours. My students LOVED drawing their bedrooms. They were very excited! If you look at the two links above you will get a very good idea of the ranges and diversity of results from this assignment.
During a free day earlier in the year, a couple girls started making little 3-D interior scenes from cardboard and random materials. This gave me the idea to have all of the students make bedrooms or interior scenes after drawing them in one-point perspective. We used cardboard, matboard, paper, tissue paper, wooden pieces, tinfoil, fabric and other random odds and ends to construct our rooms.
Now I do not run a TAB choice art classroom, but I do allow students to run with ideas and I don’t want every kid to make the exact same thing. For example, one student wanted to make a basketball court (see below), another pair wanted to make a wrestling ring and another girl made an outdoor patio scene (complete with an umbrella, chair and tire swing!). This project naturally resulted in many kids working together, some deciding to create the different rooms in the same house (bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, etc.)
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