How to Draw- Sports

A few years ago when my 5th graders created "sports spheres" for a lesson, I made up some "how to draw" handouts for a baseball/softball, basketball, volleyball, and tennis ball. They are now in my drawing ideas notebook and continue to be useful to students. When I came across the handouts I figured they might be useful to others so I got them put together to post on the SmARTteacher. I couldn't get a PDF with a small enough file size to post on the website so I had to post JPEGs. I think the pictures here will show up larger making it easier to print.

6th Choice- Sports

This is the 4th post about my 6th graders' choice art projects to end the year. You can read the first explanatory post here. This is the post all about sports! All it took was one student asking to make a cardboard version of her competitive softball team's logo and several other students in her class fed off of that idea.

 The first "sports" student spent time getting the plan drawn out, painted, and carefully cut out. Unfortunately, some of the projects never went beyond sloppy paintings. With more time, I would have encouraged the two students whose work is pictured below to paint the background and clean up the logos.

Beyond baseball and softball, I seem to have a lot of students in soccer leagues. This is different for me since I grew up in a small town and didn't really know anyone who played soccer outside of the occasional game in PE. I thought my two soccer drawing students did a nice job on their projects.

I was glad that this student added dimension to the words in his drawing and replaced the "o"s with soccer balls.

This student followed a tutorial I printed off last year for the Sports Spheres project to draw the correct shapes in her soccer ball. I like the perspective she used in her drawing.

Sports Spheres

 I've been trying to teach my students the difference between shapes and forms. I knew I wanted to do a lesson with 5th grade focused on the illusion of form through creating value and when I found out that our Family Fun Night (an event that bring several hundred students and their families to the building) theme would be "Sportacular", I decided to use the spheres found in sports as inspiration. Really, it makes sense. Balls are something tangible that the students are very familiar with, and sports are very motivating. (*By the way, try not to say the word "balls" if you can avoid it. It often leads to wild giggles.) I did tell the students if they didn't want to paint a ball, they could think of another spherical object to paint.

I borrowed a variety of balls from our PE teacher so the students would have a real object to look at. To introduce the assignment, I grabbed the real basketball, a painting I made of a basketball, and I made a quick line contour drawing of a basketball on the whiteboard. The students discussed how they were alike and different then I showed how 3D objects, objects with FORM, have highlights and shadows, and that adding highlights and shadows (VALUE) to paintings can create the illusion of form. I finally remembered to bring a flashlight to school which helped illustrate the concept of highlights. Regular fluorescent lighting is not directional so it can be hard for students to see. 

I demonstrated painting a sphere. I recommended that the students paint a base color first, followed by adding the highlight, then add the shadow last and blend, blend, blend. The students used a compass to draw a circle on a 9x12 inch piece of paper then chose their paint colors. The balls did not have to be painted in traditional colors. For white spheres, I suggested choosing a color instead of black for the shadow. After the base of the sphere was painted, the students added the identifying lines. 

In the second class period, the students added the remaining details then cut out their balls. Because I knew I would be asked a hundred times how to draw the lines and I didn't have enough balls for everyone, I made up some reference pages that showed the steps for drawing a basketball, baseball/softball, volleyball, and how a tennis ball would look from different views. Only a few students attempted soccer balls and I showed them the "how to draw a soccer ball" page here because I honestly wasn't sure how the pentagons and hexagons fit together before. If I teach this same lesson again, I will not recommend golfballs. A couple students attempted, but there were too darn many dimples and it just didn't work out well. Most students drew in pencil first then used a thin brush to paint the lines and a few used sharpies. I hoped that all would have time to use the thin paintbrush because I thought it would be good to practice brush control.

Some of the artwork went on my bulletin board and the rest of the balls were taped along the hallway walls to look like they were bouncing. After this project I found out that some of my 5th graders need more practice with their cutting skills! Or maybe it was an issue of patience. Either way, some students did a really nice job painting then cut it out so sloppily that it didn't even look like a circle anymore.

 I definitely wanted to use the bulletin board to drive home the main points with students and show everyone that we didn't just make decorations.

 My favorite part is below. I labeled 2D examples with "this is a shape"and "this is the illusion of form" then painted a styrofoam ball the same color to hang from the ceiling with a label that says "this is an actual form".

6th Grade Monochromatic Silhouettes

Ancient Greek pottery was the inspiration for this project. I thought the students were going to be studying Greece at the time of the lesson but the schedule had changed. Guess they just got a little preview. The students viewed (described, analyzed, interpreted, and judged) images of Greek pottery and discussed the positive and negative space relationships, the monochromatic silhouettes, and how the images showed action to tell a story. The students thought of their favorite things to do and chose one activity to show in their silhouette paintings.

I really liked the image below and the students were excited to find out that the central figures on the pot are boxing! I called on individual students to make observations about the pot and after they had shared their initial observations, we just went through each of the elements of art and discussed how each is used on the pot. The pot, a three-dimensional work of art with two-dimensional surface decoration allowed for a great discussion on positive and negative space. I like to tell them that negative space is the space around a space to get their attention! The actual pot is positive space and the empty area around it and through the handles is negative space. When it comes to the decoration, the figures and designs in the darker color are positive and the lighter color (empty space) is negative space.

510-500 BC

I told the students that the figures and props in their paintings were going to be one solid color to make the entire work monochromatic (mono= one, chromatic= color). A monochromatic color scheme uses tints and shades of one color. A tint is a color with white added to it and a shade is a color with black added to it. I had a wooden drawing model that I put behind a piece of fabric serving as a makeshift curtain to show them a silhouette but it was still hard for the students to grasp that everything they drew was going to be one solid color. I finally thought to remind them of the iPod commercials that showed the silhouette and that helped. I happily made a fool of myself to demonstrate finding the best angle to show the action of the activity the students had chosen. I asked for ideas they had come up with and showed a straight-on and profile view and talked about which would be a better choice for each.

The students didn't have very much experience drawing figures so I told them just to do their best. Before they started drawing, I talked about the ancient Greek ideas of the "ideal" human proportions. I told them that we didn't need to worry about faces since just the silhouette is shown but that your foot is the same size as your head and that your body is about 8 heads high. The students in the first 6th grade class didn't believe me so I had one of the students measure my head. Then we got to integrate math! The student said my head measured 8 inches so we multiplied that by 8 to get 64 inches. They I had the students divide 64 by 12 to convert the inches to feet. We came up with 5' 4". I am really 5' 7" but I told them that is pretty close! The students chose a piece of construction paper and spent the first class drawing the silhouettes in pencil. I normally have assigned seats but to make it easier to handle paint for the second class, I grouped the student by the color of paper they had chosen. I passed out pretty small brushes and the students painted in their figures/props. We need to keep working on craftsmanship but here are a few of the more successful student examples:

Sports were the most popular activities chosen but some students chose things like reading, making art, or baking. Just about anything can work, you just have to find the right angle.