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"Three Dimensional Drawing" a project with classes three and four at Chapel St. Leonards Primary School, Lincolnshire.
The finished project. The football match. I have been delivering transferable artistic skills to children at Chapel St. Leonards Primary School, since September 2005. I visit the school on Friday afternoon and deliver simple one session lessons or longer projects to children. When I originally took on the task the headmaster Mr Thrower wanted all the children to benefit from this project and so this project was designed to be inclusive of all the group.
This project is based around a simple motif that all the children are familiar with, the stick figure and involves the children in using observation, measuring, assembly and drawing skills. They also had to record motion with their digital camera. The project therefore incorporated the headmasters development of traditional transferable skills but in the eventual construction of the figures using garden canes allowed the children to see the diverse potential in contemporary art through materials and ideas. Delivering the Project: Step 1: The first step was to get the children observing the figure and instead of a cross with a football for a head and one extra line for a second leg. One of the children would pose whilst the others tried to make stick figures adding knee and elbows by breaking single lines into two lines, spacing the arms with a line for the shoulders. Some of the results are shown below.
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Image 1
Image 2 |
Image 3 |
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Once the children had quite a few sketches they were asked to select one conveying movement and then try to develop the figure using more lines. The resultant work from one of the children shown in image four was made with cut up strips of paper in collage |
Image 4 |
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To turn these into three dimensional drawings we now needed to transfer the lines into three dimensions, this we would do with garden canes. Step 2: The Football World Cup was taking place at the time of this project and so it was decided that the final figures we would make (six) would be of people playing football. Each of the figure made would be based of six selected children, all the dimensions would come from specific children. These final works could not have existed without them. We also needed observational work with the children's camera, below are some of the results.
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Given the measurements taken on the left we had now to marry up the stick figures, the photographs and the measurements taken, (see right). This was achieved by simply drawing straight lines onto the figures and extracting a base for the stick figure (see below) to which we could attach the appropriate measurements, we did not have an exact copy of the pose in the photograph but enough to generate a lifelike figure. |
Body Measurements in Centimetres Name Around head ..........................................................cms Top of head Base of spine....................................cms Top of head - Sole of foot.........................................cms Fingertip Fingertip.................................................cms Fingertip - Elbow .....................................................cms Top of hip Sole of foot............................................cms Tip of big toe Tip of opposite finger.........................cms Sole of foot To knee .............................................cms |
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With all the information we needed we could start to think about constructing the figures. |
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Step 3: Before we started on the large sculptures i decided to try to get the children to think about how they would be assembled and the idea that the canes would be like lines on a rough drawing and so that to give the figures strength we could add other pieces like additional lines on a drawing, as long as the figure was fleetingly illustrated by the work from the photograph and the measurements the extra lines could add movement and dynamic to the work. To do this we spent an afternoon making smaller figures with straws, see below.
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Step 4: All that was left now was to construct the life-size figures. This was done over two hectic but exciting afternoons, photographs of two the children with there "Three Dimensional Drawings" can be seen below.
Unfortunately one of the figure did not make it into the final piece which was displayed at the school Summer Fete. So five pieces are what makes up the final work seen at the top of the page, photographed and background removed in Photoshop. Two of the single figures are shown be.ow. |
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The Goalkeeper |
The Striker |
