Inside the Primary Classrooms

3F had a wonderfully spontaneous art lesson with Minnie, Mrs Dempsey’s dog this week. As you may already know, Minnie spends the day in the Primary School on Wednesdays as part of a wellbeing trial program for Term 1. Last week in Art, we were due to start a series of drawing lessons that would focus on careful observation of shapes and form, drawn from looking at real objects. In the Year 3 program, our topic was to be Australian plants and flora, using our classroom collection of dried banksia cones and branches of gum leaves.

Seeing as though Minnie was at school, I decided to challenge the girls with a different approach to drawing from life. Instead of starting with the still life of dried seed pods that we had originally planned, I decided to see how they would respond to a life drawing of a living animal. Minnie obliged us by ignoring the mat we offered for her, continuing instead to move around the art room, giving the girls a moving subject!

Despite the challenge of drawing something that kept moving, the lesson followed the same principles of all good drawing tasks. The girls were reminded to look closely and carefully at what they were drawing. They looked at the round shape of Minnie’s eyes and the triangular shape of her nose. They were encouraged to notice the texture of her fur and how it was longer on either side of her nose than the fur on the top of her head. Then they noticed that the fur on her ears was longer and curlier than they had expected. Finally, they were asked to observe which part of her face was darkest, such as her eyes and nose, and to use their pencil to achieve darker shading.

The real take home moment of learning came when the girls realised, by looking at a real dog in front of them in the art room, that her eyes do not have two white half circles as highlights. They learnt how to draw the eyes with greater realism than the cartoon style of pictures they were familiar with before.

The girls all agreed that drawing Minnie is much harder than drawing a collection of objects – they really appreciated and understood what a ‘still life’ is, after drawing a constantly moving target.

Vickie Kalocsay
Years 3-6 Art Teacher