Thursday, January 27, 2011

Chick Close Grid Drawings







Students in 7th grade used a photograph of themselves taken by myself in dramatic lighting and gridded out the picture into 1"x1" squares. They then found shadow shapes and highlight shapes in their photograph and used their grid to transfer the shapes thinking about each square as a "tiny little masterpiece" onto a paper with the same scale 1"x1" grid. We then went into the drawing and outlined all the pencil lines in sharpie along with filling in the background. The last step was coloring with colored pencils each of the shapes independently trying to fit at least three colors in every shape. The result.... super psychedelic and groovy self portraits inspired by chuck close but not a direct emulation of his work. 

5 comments:

  1. OMG, I love these! I am going to have to "borrow" this idea, I think my art 1 kids would like this project.

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  2. Great, that makes me so happy! My students adored these drawings. I left the color a surprise until the day we added the colored pencil. There was a delightful uproar of oooo's and ahhhh's. I took their photos with a strong light source and then edited them in photoshop with the "cutout" filter. If you have any detailed questions just let me know! Hope it goes well, i want to see photos when they are done!

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  3. These are colored pencils? What brand of pencils are you using. The colors are just SO INTENSE! Wow!!! Gorgeous!

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  4. Just crayola colored pencils! I had them press hard to get the colors really saturated.

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  5. I love these! I would love more information about the project. Did the students only draw the highlighted parts and left of the shadows? Also how did they transfer exactly and on what kind of paper?

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