Art Lesson: perspective

January's art lesson was on depth and perspective. We started with the book All Those Secrets of the World by Jane Yolen. Its a sweet little story about a girl whose father goes in a big ship to fight in a war. When she sees tiny ships far in the distance, her cousin teaches her that when things are close they are big, but when they are far away they are little. (For some reason it makes me cry, so probably not the best story for me to read to class of second graders.)

Anyway, the artist we talked about is Andrew Wyeth, fitting since Monday was the one year anniversary of his death. The illustrations from the book remind me of the illustration The Giant by N.C. Wyeth, so it was a nice introduction. I showed the kids some of Andrew Wyeth's landscapes and we talked about adding depth to our artwork through overlapping objects, making close objects larger than faraway objects, and placing close objects lower on the page than faraway objects. We also learned the concept of taking liberties with respect to art and how an artist may change a structure or setting to create balance and harmony.

The kids drew a landscape with overlapping hills, either a house or trees that were in scale with their location, and a path or trail that widened as it got closer; as long as they included those three things they could do whatever they wanted. They could use crayon, pencil, or both as their media and they could chose a country or city scene. (We used the book for Caps for Sale as inspiration.) They did an amazing job, my little artists.