A quick sketchbook activity to help students open up creative possibilities!

Materials: leaves, pencils, sketchbooks

Students used a full face magazine image to work from and learned the grid technique to practice drawing realistically with a focus on the use of tone.

The images below are from a Grade 9 class!

Materials: pencils, kneaded erasers, sketchbooks, magazines

Students collected leaves outdoors, chose 1, and grid it in their sketchbooks. They then created an enlarged version and divided it into 5 sections to focus on particular techniques - stippling with oil pastel, blending with markers, shading with conte, crosshatching with pencil crayon, and creating value with collage.

Materials: 18x24 Mayfair, oil pastel, pencil crayons, magazines, conte, charcoal, markers, paint brushes

Adapted from Ken Vieth's Book 'From Ordinary to Extraordinary: Art & Design Problem Solving'. Students were each given a No. 2 Pencil to study, they created an outline of an object and creatively filled it with pencil shapes: distorting, condensing, changing the width and length.

Materials: pencils, pencil crayons, sketchbooks, No. 2 Pencils