Why ride waves when you can paint them :: Oil Pastel studies of waves

In continuing to prepare the 2D Design class to jump right into landscape painting from picture reference for their turn of doing a Place of Grace, we got our proverbial feet wet by wave painting!

While we could have done a youtube instructional video for this one, after the clouds in the sky and the tree, I felt like they should attempt the waves a little more on their own. I did provide some instruction for the purposes of prompting them to connect what they would do with the waves back to the tree and the clouds - like helping them to realize that the crest of the wave is not unlike the clouds or the foliage of the trees. I also helped them to see the darks, mediums, and lights of the sections of the wave as well as helping them to understand where things should be more heavily blended and where their marks should be preserved as they are.

Overall, the goals of the wave painting were to allow them to have a lot more autonomy, be a little more intentional with their marks, and prove to them that they can paint (and well at that!) by using a picture as a reference. I differentiated the instruction by allowing them to select which wave they would do but by the end of the exercise they all had attempted to do both to of them. I projected two pictures I found of wave paintings online and I projected them split-screen style on the dry erase board so I could label them as I needed to.

You can see some of the labels I drew on top of the pictures. 

And here is the student work! The students are getting better and better with their marks and I am so delighted with how they are becoming more "painterly" with their work overall. I am especially excited because this is a class of student artists who are very much foundational in what they know of art so this is their first major endeavor into really producing something that (for them) will feel a lot more legitimate. See if you can figure out which wave (A or B) that they did based upon their work!

This student wasn't done but I believe they have the essence of the wave they were attempting.

There was a lot of peer tutoring going on amongst them a they did their work and I know that helped. Many of them also learned (and demonstrated!) the importance of not just drawing in the center of the paper and using the whole space of the paper. Showing them how to bleed and anchor the shapes, colors, and values to the different sides of the paper really helped them to better understand the overall composition of each of their pieces.

One last thing I did was to play a youtube video as background "music" in order to make their painting as full sensory as possible. It was so relaxing hearing the waves crash every day that they did this. Here is one I used...

This is the first year that I have used youtube at least every other day - for either co-teaching instructional purposes OR to do things like helping to create a more authentic experience of creation in the studio classroom and I am going to keep doing it because it has really made a difference for the students and their work.

Something else of all of this painting of landscapes? I am convincing them (as I told them I would!) that despite any of their individual claims that I ALWAYS hear from them of "I am not an artist," they not only will come to love and crave the experience of painting but they will also be good at it too!