Shaded Forms Creatures
1. Complete pencil shading practice: 5 values strip and 4 shaded forms (from clay models
with candlelight) – smooth white to black fades.
2. Animal drawing: Choose a photo of an animal and create a representation of your animal
using basic forms (sphere, cone, cube, cylinder). Shade your forms as we practiced.
3. Background: Fill with repetitions of a simple symbol that relates to your animal. Borders
– fill with a 2 or 4 line rhyme about your animal.
Featured Artists
MC Escher – Used value contrasts to create 2D to 3D transformations. Pictures contain
many patterns and illusions.
http://www.mcescher.com/
Otto Mesmer – Created Felix the Cat – used simple shapes and black/white contrast. Felix
was the first EVER animated cartoon character and the first image broadcast on television!
http://www.ottomessmer.com/
Messmer Escher (click to enlarge)
Literacy Connections
We read and discussed these poems:
The Bat by Theodore Roethke
By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.
His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.
He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.
But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:
For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.
Raisins by Jack Prelutsky
I used to put raisins on oatmeal
Until that indelible day
When one sleepy raisin awakened
And rapidly scampered away!
Students created a 2 or 4 line rhyme about the creature they drew and included the rhyme
in their artwork.
