There has been a long gap between the previous session and today so I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get back into the swing of things. Not long, as it turned out. The children were keen to show me some of their homework from over Easter. They were sent home with some different kinds of paper and asked to do some life drawings with charcoal and pencil during the course of the holidays. I didn’t get to see everyone’s work but throughout the morning we paused to look and learn from it. There was plenty to admire. I could see that most people were making good use of the space on the page and that there was more detail coming through. We tired to guess ages and relationships of the sitters to the artist. A lot of the children said that they preferred pencil drawing to charcoal as it didn’t break so easily and was less messy. They did observe that for hair and shading charcoal was easier. There were some strong resemblances coming through the work and it was definitely easier to tell the age of the subject. The children said that they had to bribe much younger siblings to sit still with biscuits and chocolate. Joseph had drawn a profile portrait of  his Dad using a torch to cast a shadow on the wall -reminiscent of our work long ago in the Drawing with Light phase. Courtney had drawn a profile on one side of the page and a full face portrait on the other and when she held it up to the light there was an intriguing, if unintentional, overlap -might revisit that idea at a later stage. Some of the parents have been really supportive of this work at home, encouraging the children to look for details like shape of face, freckles, stubble and even wrinkles.

I have been encouraging the children to use shading but they often revert to line drawings. Since they do this so beautifully, Mrs Wilson and I have decided to cultivate the line drawings further and not worry too much about light and shade at the moment.

We wouldn’t normally look down our noses but we made an exception today. Some of the class have very interesting cartoon-like styles when it comes to drawing noses and so we experimented with different ways of tackling them by feeling the shape of our own profiles and drawing that. Most of the class reckoned that they had been underestimating the distance that the nose stuck out from the rest of the face when doing profiles. Face on is harder to master -we tried tipping the head back so that the nostrils became more noticeable. There was some mirth at this. We also looked at ears in detail.

After all of the experimentation, it seemed right to apply the fresh observations to a larger scale piece of work so the children used the drawing boards that I had improvised for them from thick corrugated cardboard and packing card. This helped them to work on bigger scale paper and allowed them to keep looking at the person they were drawing. In this case the children made a few light sketches and then “drew” boldly with paint on tea-coloured wax paper using two different sized brushes. The very silence in the room when they were working spoke volumes about the concentrated quality of the work. To free everything up even more the final few minutes of the session were spent using the brush and paint to do some “not looking” work where the children were encouraged to keep their attention on the person they were painting and not to look at the page at all. They still keep cheating at this. We will keep trying as the results are always fantastic, especially when they genuinely don’t look at the marks they are making until they finish.

Mrs Wilson and Tanya remarked that the drawing boards had made a big impact on the day’s work, giving the children added confidence and even changing their posture when they were working. There are so many potential directions with the work now -the class are freeing up. I’m not sure if there will be time for another homework before the next session.