Chicken 2: Juinter Hot and Cool

 

Grade 5/6: 2nd Chicken Drawing: This Time, with Colour!

Day 1.

As outlined in the post ‘Chicken 1’, I gave the students an opportunity to draw a live chicken (appropriately named ‘Juinter’).  After the more detailed and time consuming pencil sketch, they produced a faster line drawing using Sharpie markers directly on the page.

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Day 2.

With Juinter happily at home among her sisters (who, by the way, did NOT allow her to let her head get too big with her sudden star status as a model), we carried on to add some colour to the line drawings.

This was a pastel day: we started with colouring the chicken only with oil pastels. As with when I taught this lesson years ago, I split the class into 2 halves.  The group on the right (mostly boys, ’cause they like to sit together) were the cool (colours) group – and I showed them how to snap their fingers beatnik style. Cool, man.

The group on the left (mostly girls, ’cause they like to sit together) were the hot! (colours) group – they got the ‘ol “wet-your-finger-and-touch-it-to-your-butt-sizzle-style”. Tssss! I think they liked that. We had a couple rounds of both groups, just to get the motions and the sounds just right.

Okay, enough mucking’ around. I reviewed hot & cool colours, using the colour wheel. For sure, we were NOT trying to replicate Juinter’s actual colours. Instead, they could choose from among the luscious colours in their pastel boxes, in alignment with their group. This is when happy chatter happens, and kids settle in to life in the Art Room. Classical music on CBC Radio 2’s “Tempo” accompanies. (Thanks to Julie Nesrallah, the girl in the chair with the big hair).

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Once the chickens were coloured, it was time to switch it up. Oil pastels were exchanged for chalk pastels.  The ‘hot’ group now became the ‘cool’, and visa versa. Time to fill in the background: I gave them the choice of doing it as a flat design or as a landscape or scene that the chicken could be standing in. If I do this lesson again, I would have some examples of fun and colourful designs to inspire the first group.  The results could have been better and more carefully  and imaginatively rendered.

Those who chose to do a scene (mostly the boys) had their imaginations in play, and you can see they definitely influenced each other. (did I mention they were sitting together?) No problem!

This is lesson I was happy to repeat, with the injection of colour – in the midst of a very snowy white winter – very welcome indeed. Cheers, grade 5/6’s!

Winter 2015 / Parliament Oak School

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