“Drawing takes time. A line has time in it.” – David Hockney
A long, long time ago shortly after iPads were first released by Apple, under the vision of Superintendent Joseph Maruszczak, my school district made a commitment to include iPads in instruction. We were early adopters in the public school sector. We started in the fall of 2012 with a rollout of iPads to half of our 7th grade students who comprised one team of two at the grade level. I was teaching fifth and sixth grade then and petitioned the superintendent for a class set of iPads to keep in the art room. I had seen other art educators embracing the digital platform for its ease and accessibility. For those of us accustomed to creative technologies like Photoshop and Wacom tablets, the iPad offered a way to make digital art and photography without all the expensive hardware and software and with the mobility a tablet affords. Besides, artist David Hockney was painting on an iPad!
He said, “Yes”! In early November the iPads arrived. What excitement! What joy! What device management! Watch this: Miscoe Art 317 iPads. The iPads were a huge addition and extension to the lower middle school visual art programming options. But where to start? In order to learn how to use an iPad, I decided to challenge myself with daily digital painting: 365 iPad Drawings/My Year Creating Digitally: All in One Gallery
It was a good experience, one which I continue to draw from in my teaching and continued learning. I’ve shared about it professionally and each year I give the challenge prompts to my students to use for inspiration for warm up work, early finishers, and as an ongoing challenge.
I shared the Every Day Drawing Challenge prompts with my students in a an assignment in early November. We are straddling learning modalities this fall of the COVID-19 pandemic, shifting from fully remote to start the year and shifting to hybrid on October 13. While the kids are in school two days a week we cannot share art supplies, so I worked with my district to purchase supplies for art kits, thanks to a COVID grant and my own art budget. After one Wednesday afternoon of making up art kits…
And another Wednesday afternoon of distributing them…
Every student has a sketchbook! To get them started with the Every Day Drawing Challenge, I shared a tutorial video and asked that they choose one prompt from the whole 365 and create one drawing to submit:
Students worked on the drawings at school and at home where they added color with colored pencils or crayons based on their choice and availability. They interpreted the prompts freely, sometimes personally, sometimes more traditionally, yet always with their own point of view:
(I drew me looking upwards)
This child was prolific in her responses:
My students will have these prompts throughout the remainder of our time together and are encouraged to continue to upload their artwork to our Artsonia sharing platform as they create more drawing responses. I’ve limited this post share to ten drawings, but you can see the other 100+ on Artsonia at this link: Every Day Drawing Challenge on Artsonia Enjoy!