For young children, select a print from an artist or a coloring book and let your students identify certain shapes.
Visual art spans the globe and many generations, and awakens the innate creativity in all of us. Art lessons positively encourage freedom of expression, and integrating art into a traditional educational curriculum can make learning more exciting. Sorted into thematic units, art lessons can also promote cross-cultural understanding and critical thinking.
Traditional Art Mediums
Sometimes you will only have a pencil and a sheet of paper handy, and most of the time that is all you will need to get your creative juices flowing. A pencil is an artist's most versatile and reliable tool. Almost every artist sketches in pencil before rendering the drawing in permanent ink or paint. Experiment with just a pencil and paper for one lesson. Work on shading, lighting and conveying realism in the objects that you draw. Switch tools for the next few classes; use pastels, colored pencils, charcoal and crayons.
Cross-Learning with Art
Visit a small museum. Most well-renowned museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be crowded since they are popular tourist attractions, and you will not be able to admire a painting for as long as you'd like.
Tell your students to pick a painting and analyze it for artistic elements such as color, line, shape, form and texture. Have them try to reproduce the painting from observation. For young children, select a print from an artist or a coloring book and let your students identify or find certain shapes in the work.
Figure Drawing
In figure drawing classes, a model presents a series of poses for the artists in the room. Each pose can be held anywhere between a minute to five minutes long. The instructor usually tells the model when to switch to a different position. Figure drawing is a great way to learn draw quickly and capture the essential features of a person. If a model is not available, set an object in the center of the room and allot a given time frame at which they must sketch the item completely.
Art on Computers
Spend a day drawing using a graphic design program such as Adobe Photoshop. If a graphic tablet is available, have the students use the graphic tablet to draw a composition, and then instruct them to use the mouse to create the same composition. Assign a day devoted to color. These software make thousands of colors readily available with a few clicks. Comic books and graphic novels in particular benefit from this service.
