Ledger Art

Ledger Art was the topic of study for 2nd grade during our Cultural Heritage Week focus on Native American art last semester. Ledger Art is a unique genre of drawing on paper made by the Plains Indians from around 1860-1900. 

This is the summary I gave the students: When higher quality and more convenient art supplies became available after the Indian Wars (1870s), American Indians on the Great Plains started using them to communicate and make records. Petroglyphs (carved into rocks) and pictographs (paintings and drawings) had previously been used. Ledger books were easier to draw on and convenient to travel with. The drawings had a simple style designed for quick understanding. Instead of drawing what they saw, the artists drew the most important parts of the story.

Warning: Many of the ledger drawings show scenes of battle. Screen them before exploring with your students. I tried to avoid showing drawings with scenes of fighting and guns because the students made a big deal about it, and because I didn't want to perpetuate stereotypes since we only had time for a small piece of the overall picture.

I was planning to just offer notebook paper to the students to draw on, thinking it was the most similar to ledgers, but during my research, I also came across an internationally known Blackfeet painter named Terrance Guardipee and got a new idea. Guardipee has revived the ledger art tradition and put his own spin on it, adding collage elements of historical documents. Inspired by Guardipee, 2nd grade students used different papers (notebook paper, old worksheets, phonebook pages, etc.) to create a collage, which became the background for a drawing of a story or event from their lives.

The students drew in pencil and traced with sharpie to help the picture show up better on top of the layered text. Tempera cakes were mostly used to add color, with some students choosing to add detail with crayons. When students finished, they were given lined paper to write out the story in the picture (2-3 sentences.)

This was a good opportunity to talk about composition. What is the most important part of your story? How can you emphasize that with the composition of your artwork?

Some of my older students also gave it a try...

 

Here are some good resources on Ledger Art

http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/cool-things-native-american-ledger-art/10220

https://plainsledgerart.org/ 

http://terranceguardipee.com/

6th Grade Manga

The longest project of last semester was my 6th grade Manga lesson. As soon as I found out that Cultural Heritage Week would focus on East Asian cultures, I wanted to teach about Manga. I read a great article that was published in Art Education in 2001 on Manga as part of Visual Culture and was immediately interested. Manga is basically a Japanese comic book, the print form of Anime. 

*Did you know that Manga is read top to bottom but from right to left?

I ordered a couple of books on drawing Manga with some PTO money and also found some video tutorials from Sakura useful. (You can find the videos on my Asian Art Ideas Pinterest board.) 

I was planning on this project taking 3 classes but it ended up requiring 4. The first day was introduction and explanation of all the choices. The students could choose to tell a whole story in multiple panels on their page, tell part of a story in multiple panels, or focus on one character with a speech or thought bubble. If the students decided to tell a story, I asked them to make a simple list of what would happen in each frame. It's a lot easier to tell a story in comic form if you know what needs to happen! The next class and usually part of the 3rd were spent drawing with pencil. When everything was planned in pencil, the students checked with me and started tracing with sharpie after they were approved. 

TIP- Have the students trace the words inside their bubbles before they trace the bubble itself. Students tend to write small, forgetting that tracing in sharpie makes it spread a bit. If the words end up too big, they can always redraw the bubble.

 Violence is an issue that needs to be addressed with this project. Lots of anime has fighting in it. I told the students if they had people fighting in their story, it could not end with someone getting hurt. I asked them to think of a surprise ending that's more appropriate for school. 

I really, really love this project. It allowed the students to learn about Manga as an important part of Visual Culture, practice a style of drawing different from strict observation, incorporated writing and story telling, and they were able to show their interests. Some of the drawings were funny or silly, some a little, well, shallow, but I found many to be very honest. I had several students tell me their drawing was based on a true story, and several showed insecurities or vulnerabilities. It was nice to see from my 6th graders who are starting to suffer from the elementary school version of Senioritis.

Some of the drawings were a bit puzzling. The following drawing was described as a true story. I think maybe inspired by a true story since anyone old enough to have a married ex would probably not ask their mom for permission to go to the mall. :)