Week 2 Visual Arts

This week in Viz Arts, I was forced to completely leap out of my comfort zone and work with quite possibly the most difficult subject possible: the face. As is the case for my drama experience that I wrote about last week, I really must learn to become more comfortable and skilled in these areas I am especially not confident about. Otherwise how will I inspire my future students to be creative and imaginative in themselves? As stated by Gibson & Ewing (2011), "a teacher's feeling insecure or anxious about a particular artform may mean they totally ignore it in their classroom, despite it being a mandated part of the curriculum."

The proposition posed by Robyn at the beginning of the workshop was a great one: If I can come out of the workshop with a better facial drawing than I had imagined in my mind at the start, then the workshop was a success. I fully believe this was the case and as a result, I feel much more confident about this whole daunting process! The session broke down the elements of the face in a very systematic/logical process, which I can handle. This vastly helped dictate the proportions of the eyes, nose, and mouth as well as relative sizes of everything in relation to each other. The following were pointers discussed in the workshop.

• The eyes are much much closer to the middle of the head than I previously thought. In fact, they are situated pretty much on the midline that bisects the face (line #1).
• Dividing the face into fifths horizontally on line #1, the eyes can be approximately placed in the 2nd and 4th sections.
• Line #2 bisecting the bottom half of the face is approximately where the bottom of nose is.
• Line #3 bisecting the remaining bottom portion of face is the mouth line.
• Lines from the middle of each eye down to line #3 are the boundaries of the mouth. This one blew my mind the most.
• The eyes and top of the ears are on the same line (also completely surprised me).

Actual Phil

Phil-like sketch

Using observations about the face, which I had never really paid much attention to, my sketch of my gracious subject Phil resembled his actual face much more than an alien, which is always a good sign! I was actually quite surprised with my drawing after I added the hair/facial hair. While it does not resemble him too greatly, I was genuinely satisfied to have produced a sketch that is much better quality than I expected.

A significant thought of mine about the entire process is that it really only took some relatively simple pointers about facial features to drastically improve my facial drawing skills. I can definitely teach these to future students, which will hopefully empower them to attempt these drawings, as it did with me.

If the students are Early Stage 1 or Stage 1, I would modify the number of rules and dimension specifications to suit their abilities. For the older S2/S3's, they should be able to handle most of the elements. While there may be lots of laughing and embarrassment during the process, there is little problem as long as we all recognize it as a learning process and that some people will just naturally have an easier or tougher time.