How did we get to this? It all started off innocently enough today but plans were afoot to push into new drawing territory and it was about to get a little messy…

We began to experiment with drawing pencils, seeing which was darker, a HB, 2B, 4B or 6B. I had sent some new pencils in the post since the previous online session.

We looked at drawings by artists like Colin Davidson and Rembrandt to see how they drew shadows and tried to find dark and light areas within these images. The children were predominantly drawing with line at this stage, although some had started to add shading.

The class came up with  reasons why we might use bread:

To dab the pencil with

To draw on

For eating

Instead we covered sheets of paper with charcoal, shaped the slice of bread and used it to erase the charcoal and show the light areas were in our portraits. We did short studies with different sizes of paper and worked on freeing up arm movements to fill areas more quickly. One of the other teachers in the school came in at the end of the session and her face was a picture of horror when she saw the charcoal and crumbs. Mrs Wilson had a large smile on her face -perhaps it was a grimace. It will all wash off….eventually….