The most difficult part of the lesson is creating the figures with arms and legs that bend in places they should bend. It sounds easy but when you're still new a figure drawing, it is very challenging. I've tried having students pose their own bodies, photograph poses and draw over them on the interactive whiteboard, and cut out paper people that they can pose and trace. All these methods have helped, but I just stumbled on one that may be transformational when I found the Wooden Doll 3D app for the iPad.
Below: These are examples from second graders who have hand-drawn after great struggles the four action poses. They completed these with complementary colors pairs in the negative and positive spaces then completed them with line and shape pattern.
1. Open the Wooden Doll App, click through the tutorial, and adjust the pose. I would need students to make the pose show action with a frontal view. The app can spin, rotate, and do so many poses it may be confusing at first. 2. Take a screenshot of the pose you like and import it into a drawing app with layers like SketchbookX. Change the opacity to 50% to grey it out and add a layer over. Choose a black line (3pt) and trace a little beyond the edge of the body for a Keith Haring like drawing. Don't add a neck and exaggerate the head. 3. Delete the wooden doll layer so that you are only looking at the line drawing. Use the paint bucket to choose complementary colors (red + green, purple + yellow, orange + blue) to fill the figure and the background. Hint: make sure the lines touch before you fill otherwise you will "spill". Save image to camera roll. |
(Bottom layer) I repeated the steps above 3 times to make three figures and merged them together into one layer in Sketchbook express. (Middle layer) I drewshape and line patterns while creating color balance in the positive and negative spaces. (Top Layer) I traced with a thicker black and used the line tool for straight edges and dividers. |
Keith Harings figures lend themselves to fun interactive ideas. (Right) Students pose before green screen imitating the figures. See the Fugleflick, Different is Good, to see this image in context. Below is an animation from the Keith Haring Kids site. These would be very fun to animate in Doink. See how we animated alien-ish figures in this app in 3rd grade here.
Complementary in Every Way
Black Marker
Repeat (line, shape, & color pattern)
Different is Good