Lesson Two
Day One
Lesson Two will have the students go from the human's eye view to bird's eye. We will take a field trip to a nearby university that has a self-contained campus. I will ask parents to provide their child with a disposable camera for the trip and agree to develop the film or to allow them to bring a digital camera. I will also bring as many digital cameras as I can check out from the school. The campus is divided roughly into two halves. The bus will first drive us all around the campus. Each student will be instructed to take notes and drawings as we go around the different building. Next, the bus will drop us off in the center of one side and then will take us to the other side. When we are off the bus, the students will take a variety of photographs from their human's eye view. They will also explore worm's eye view by lying on the ground and taking photographs looking up at the buildings. They will need to have 7 human's eye views and 3 worm's eye view on each side of the campus. The extra photos can be their choice. The worm's eye view photos will be used after the unit to explore three-point perspective. The students will eventually use their human's eye view photographs and notes and sketches to create a bird's eye view/panoramic map of the campus. I will give the parents (and myself) the weekend to develop the film but I actually will not expect it until a week after the trip.
Day Two and Three
While waiting for the photographs to be developed, we will explore linear perspective. As anyone who as ever attempted to teach linear perspective knows, it is a challenging and frustrating experience, both for the teacher and the students. Some students understand it almost instantly and other just never seem to grasp it. The students who "get" it want to learn more and are very excited about the potential that this new techniques affords them. They get very frustrated with those who don't "get" it. Those who struggle with the technique, get frustrated because they see other students understanding it effortlessly. To motivate the students who will struggle and to provide the more in depth information that the students who "get" want, I show a wonderful video, Masters of Illusion. This 30-minute video introduces perspective as it is used in movie special effects and then explores the history of perspective. Many art exemplars are shown and clear, concise explanations of linear perspective are shown. While this video does not solve the problems associated with teaching perspective, it does tend to ameliorate them somewhat. After the video, I will demonstrate how to draw simple boxes with one point perspective. I will ask the students to draw ten boxes using this method. I will circulate and try to help as needed. The following class period, I will demonstrate drawing a simple room and a simple street scene and ask them to pick one to try. Again, I will circulate and help.
Day Four
This day will be used to organize the photographs from the trip and to introduce the Renaissance panoramic maps of cities, specifically some of George Braun's maps. The university that we visited has very strong gothic architecture. Many of the buildings look Medieval, with rose windows, gothic arches, gargoyles, stone carving, leaded windows, etc. I will show them a PowerPoint presentation on these maps and will have 2D color copies on a bulletin board for closer examination by the students. The panoramic maps often show a couple or a few figures in the immediate foreground dressed in "native" costumes of the city depicted.
Using their notes and drawings and the photographs that they took (along with ones I took strategically to assist in this assignment), I will explain that they will need to create a panoramic map of the campus. This problem will be more difficult than the previous one (creating a bird's eye view map of their hose and surrounding neighborhood) since this will be an area that they are not intimately familiar with (as they were with their homes). They will also not have the added benefit of a satellite view of the campus to work from. The students will have to work like the cartographers/artists did in the Renaissance. I expect that after organizing the photos, the PowerPoint assignment and explanation of the project, it will be the end of the class.
Day Five
After a review of the assignment, I always have the students help me create a rubric on which their work will be graded. I strongly guide this process and will be very clear in my explanation of the assignments requirements. Thus, the students should be able to give me the criteria. They will then write the criteria in the sketchbook so that they can refer back to as the work on their project continues. Once that is done and everyone is clear about what they need to do, I will allow them time to do planning drawings in their sketchbooks. I will need to approve each plan.
Day Six
Next, I will give each student a large piece of watercolor paper (18" x 24"). Using a pencil, the students will draw their solution to the problem on their paper. In addition to the map of the city, they will draw two figures, a boy and a girl dressed as contemporary college students. After they are satisfied with their drawing and have gained my approval, they will use a permanent fine tip black marker to trace their pencil line. They will then erase the pencil lines. If they finish before the end of the class, they can start their homework assignment, which will be to create a timeline of the history of maps in their sketchbook. I will have an article ready to give to them, printed from HYPERLINK http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/pre/map/maphis.html, and the instructions on the requirements of the timeline assignment.
Day Seven and Eight
At the beginning of class, I will demonstrate how to use watercolors, focusing on amount and proper use of water and color mixing based on the color theory that we explored in the beginning of the semester. In fact, during the painting part of the project, they will have the sketchbook open to the color mixing/theory sketchbook page that they had created earlier, for reference. The student will use these two days to finish the painting.
Day Nine
We will have a group critique with the finished paintings. We will use the same rules as before with the exception that I will expect each student to comment on two different paintings. After the critique, they will do a self-assessment form with the rubric of criteria on which the project will be graded. I will also have them answer a variety of questions that will ask them about their process of creating the map, what was successful and why, what could be improved and why, and what they felt they had learned from this assignment.
Comments: