Contorted Cartoons

"Let's shade some forms!" (YaWn!)
 
We've seen it before, the age old exercise of shading cones, cylinders, spheres, and cubes, and boring the artistic spirit out of our students. My twist is to have students chat and write about their favorite cartoons they lived as younger kids. We laughed at how creepy Teletubbies were, or how funny SpongeBob and Patrick were, or the game characters they loved. Each student printed out an image of their favorite about the size of their open hand. 

​These were glued to the back of form templates I found on Google Images and had printed onto card-stock paper. We used markers and colored pencils to give them basic colors before cutting out the forms and gluing them. It was very helpful to have students pre-fold their templates with the edge of a ruler. We spoke about how folding a 2D image onto a 3D surface fractured the images in a way that Cubism also did in art history, but also how the Pop Artists of the 1960s would use cartoon images. This meant our project was a kind of modern mash-up. 

Each student was to make one form, and to work in groups of 3 or 4 to draw a collection of forms as a kind of still-life drawing. (Those who finished quickly were told to sketch their individual form as practice in the back of their workbooks, like above.) The forms were placed on a white sheet of paper so that their shadows would be more evident. We started with the light on, then when we got to shadows, I turned off the lights and used the windows as out light source so that shadows would be more pronounced.
 
I created a video to help students through the process.

• Draw the forms and the paper they were sitting on
• Draw the cartoon so it looked like it was on a 3D surface
• Add shadows to the forms and then the cast shadows.

​The cartoons helped personalize their work. By working with friends, they learned something about each other. They saw that forms change as the surface bends or turns. They learned how to shade fairly well with a project that was not too overwhelming. And they learned their teacher is pretty old and liked cartoons they never heard of.
 
The whole exploration took about 5 class days from printing images to final shading. We worked on 12 x 18 inch paper, but any size will do. We used cartoons, but any image on the surface would be fine, maybe even patterned paper. I just found that cartoons were a great motivator, made the lesson a bit more fun, and resulted in some fun conversations. I always try to connect student work back to their interests.