Palimpsest Drawing

In our throw-away and digital society, the concept and necessity of using Palimpsests are outdated and antiquated ones.

In art, you can get an interesting visual look by writing over and over on a piece of paper and then creating a realistic or non-objective scene that represents the words. I had students choose an overarching theme and then a word and a quotation that goes with that idea. Students free-wrote about their theme, gessoed over the words, then wrote the word and quote, and finally created an image over all those previous layers.

Song lyrics: Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol

Stencil Self-Portrait

Highlights: Find the lightest areas of an image and cut them out.

Spray or brush the light color in the highlight shapes.

Shadows: Find the darkest values in an image. It helped me to draw over them with a black marker.

Cut dark shadows out.

Line up your image with the first stencil color. Spray or brush through the stencil. 

Now you have an image with highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. I think my mid-tones are a bit dark here, so it's not as successful as it could be.

This is from a session I went to at the NAEA Convention in March called "Tag It" A Unit on Graffiti and Stencil Street Art by Deborah Huff. Nasco has published this lesson plan as well.

NAEA San Diego Pre-Conference Workshop

   See the presenters' website: http://www.journalfodderjunkies.blogspot.com

Big theme ideas:

My notes and work from the day:

Mind Map:

Drawing from mind map. 

This is a symbology prompt drawing activity where you or students rank a circle, a square, a triangle, a cross, and a spiral as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then you create a design showing your preference. 

This was free writing about one of the big ideas with a water soluable writing implement. Then re-emphasizing certain words as shown on their slides above. 

Quick Artwork2

All I have had time for lately is to throw a quick example together for my students. They're working on collages. Enjoy!