In Year 2 we have been very busy!
This week, we have focused on our sketching skills and techniques. We began by practicing our shading, using a range of different pencils. We tested out HB, 2B and 6B to see how their shades differed. We also noticed that our school pencils are 2B so we tried to use these too! We know that the pressure that we put on our pencil can also impact how light or dark our shading is. We tried this technique with a coloured pencil too. After this, we made different patterns and practiced making different lines and shapes and we then moved on to cross-hatching. This is a technique that uses lines to shade an area. If we separate the lines more, our shading will be much more light, compared to tightly compacted lines and crosses.
We then began to study M.C Escher. He was a Dutch artist who initially wanted to become an architect, which we discussed was somebody who designs buildings. He made murals, prints (similar to our previous artist, Andy Warhol but with much less colour!) and woodcuts. We looked at a few pieces of his art and noticed how detailed his work was!
You can see stairs leading to nowhere and maze-like designs. In these pieces of work, you can see the influence that his interest in architecture had. Once we had discussed what we liked about his work, we wrote a little bit about the colours that he uses and we also spotted some techniques that he used for shading.
Later, we looked a small part of his work and worked really hard to try to create the different lines and shapes that we saw. This was a chance for us to practice our shading. We even had to draw multiple geese but at this point, we were unsure as to why they were included in the drawing. We then looked at the completed version and realised that the fields become the geese!
In his art, you might notice that he uses metamorphosis. We found out that this is when shapes become different things within the art, and we could definitely see that in this piece. We were challenged to try to imitate this art and use our the space in our sketchbook to use shading and careful precision to best recreate Escher’s fascinating work.
We were all very proud of our artwork and can’t wait to study more artists in the future!
M.C. Escher was a very cool artist of his time. He was different, and I think different is always cool.
I enjoyed learning about shading with different pencils, and colours as well as learning the different techniques of drawing such as crosshatching. Thank you teachers.