In Steve Maldonado’s class, Youth in Arts Mentor Artist Lisa Summers introduced students to a range of drawing and ink wash techniques to play with lines, shape, color, dimension, and perspective as part of this year’s Arts Unite Us residency at College of Marin. Throughout this ten-week program, students explored different ways of seeing, starting with a variety of graphite pencils and crayons and working on gaining exposure to more and more visual arts materials. We considered questions like: “Which one feels comfortable in your hand? Which one feels heavy or awkward? What kinds of lines to different kinds of pencils and pens make? What happens when you draw a face or an object without lifting your pencil from the paper? How do seemingly random lines and shapes organized into an image?”
Next we played with oil pastels and an ink wash. Students used simple wooden blocks to assemble familiar structures that they could draw using observational drawing techniques. During this exercise, we considered the following questions: “Where were the shadows? How do we make something become three dimensional?”
Following the observational drawing lesson, we continued learning with lines and shapes. After looking at a few examples from American artist, cartoonist and puppeteer Wayne White, students drew horizon lines to explore perspective using block letters that spelled out words they chose. Some of the questions we asked were: “What are some words people might use to describe you?” Or, “What’s your favorite pastime?”
Examples of student work from Steve’s COM class will be on display at Youth In Arts during the summer exhibition, “Outside the Lines: Collaborative Art in Special Day Classrooms” opening on July 31st, 2019.
Through the California Department of Education’s Student Support and Academic Enrichment (SSAE) grant that the Marin County Office of Education received, Youth in Arts was in multiple Special Day Classes this spring.
