“To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.” – Stephen Hawking
As I curate the student artwork for this post, I just can’t stop downloading pieces from Artsonia because they are ALL OUT OF THIS WORLD!!!
We just wrapped up this project and most students have had a chance to upload their work to Artsonia where they are on display in this gallery: https://www.artsonia.com/museum/gallery.asp?project=1822853
These are the covers for the sketchbooks we made two weeks ago. Space scenes are first sketched out with white colored pencil on purple tag stock after the book is made. Students opened the books flat on the tables and treated both outside front and back covers as one panel or scene. Color was added with oil pastel and blended with blending stomps.
This was a super engaging project for all due to (I think) the tactile quality of the oil pastels, the freedom of imagery, and the huge success of overlaying one color on another as it hides a lot of missteps.
Students were given a few resource sheets of planets, meteors, comets, rockets, and constellations. From there they were encouraged to create their own unique space scenes. Martians welcome.
This was a great opportunity to talk about the difference between an artistic rendering and a scientific diagram. Come to find out, some sixth grade science classes had made scientific diagrams of the solar system recently, and this project helped to foster further connections with the topic of space.
This project also generated discussion about perspective. Rather than draw themselves surrounded by space, students were asked to imagine themselves being immersed in space where every time they turned their heads, all they saw were planetary and other objects, not their own bodies.
The relaxed yet eager work sessions generated a lot of conversation (no surprise – Area 51 was a frequent topic 😊) contrasting with periods of total silence except for the music air-playing to the speaker (I’ve been stuck on Jack Johnson in the classroom lately).
As students finished, they used Autodesk Sketchbook on iPads to create digital space scenes. Those will be posted in a few days.
Meanwhile, enjoy these vibrant space scenes! I hope you love them as much as I do!
