In today’s art lesson, we took on an op art drawing, based on this video. I showed them Bridget Riley’s 1961 Movement in Squares, and we discussed its illusion and effect on the viewer. We even widened the scope momentarily and suggested that so much art is, in fact, an illusion: that still life of an apple in the museum is not actually an apple, no matter how close the resemblance!
We started by lightly tracing our non-dominant hands (including the wrist) in pencil. Next we used rulers to draw horizontal lines — about a half inch apart — outside the boundaries of our hands. Next, inside the hands, we connected the horizontal lines by bumping them up, to roughly match the rise of our hands. (Notice how the bumps went about to the next line up, before coming back down.)
Then we went over the horizontal lines (including bumps) with washable markers. The outlines we drew of our hands were still present, but faint. And finally, after selecting three colored pencils (I suggested they choose either warm or cool colors), we began to shade. This harkened back to our brightness/darkness lesson from earlier in the month: the darkest shading was just around the outline (mimicking a shadow), and the lightest shade (perhaps even not marking the paper) on the top of the hand.
This was a challenge, and time was tight, but the group performed admirably. I was impressed by the results and all the hard work that was put in.