Starters for 10 – Using Sketchbooks in the morning
Once you have made or personalised your sketchbooks, to start getting pupils into the sketchbook habit, try giving all pupils a “sketchbook start” to their day.
Using sketchbooks at the beginning of the school day can help pupils make the transition from arriving to settling for work. They help focus the children and get them to start thinking and responding creatively.
Here are 10 x ten minute simple sketchbook starters – Pls add your own via the comment box below for all to share.
1. Make a shy drawing – feel shy when you draw, move only your fingers or wrist, draw quietly… sensitively…
2. Make a loud drawing – use dark or bright drawing materials, make vigorous marks, drawing quickly. It should be the drawing which is noisy – not the person!
3. Draw, collage or paint a pattern inspired by the words: “twirling, growing, happy”. The “pattern” must cover the whole page and go to all the edges. Change the words if you prefer…
4. Draw ants, spiders, bugs, butterflies. Draw only very small creatures on your page, all over your page. Place a piece of tracing paper over your page of creatures, and draw the lines they would have made as they flew or walked – but don’t just use normal pencil lines – use dotted lines, soft lines, scribble lines, curly lines, shy lines… Don’t draw so many lines your creatures are covered, and think where the lines are going. use cellotape to stick the tracing paper over your drawing of creatures on one side (to make a page you can turn).
5. Sitting in your place, look around the room. Fix your eyes on a corner of the room which is far away, and start drawing your version of it on your paper. Don’t worry if you can’t see detail – get your impression down on paper. Draw out from the corner you have chosen – remember the “corner” might not be an actual corner of the room, but a corner created by a shelf, or window or bookcase, or curtain… Fill your page
6. Get some lego (or other similar elemental toy), and draw the elements on your page. have them close to you so you can touch them and turn them over before you draw them, so you really know what they’re like – but don’t start building with them (yet). Use colour as well as pencil. Design a few lego shapes of your own.
7. Build with the lego (or similar) for just a minute or so, and draw what you have built.
8. Choose a paragraph out of a story book and read it out loud. Write it on a board too so it can be seen. Re-write the story on a sketchbook page, replacing words with images wherever possible. Be as inventive as you can.
9. Let you tongue feel what your teeth feel like, and feel what your gums are like. Don’t put your fingers in your mouth. Then make a drawing about what you think your mouth/teeth/gums feels like (not looks like)
10. Put a board in the classroom and invite pupils to write their suggestions for ten minute starters…
Shared sketchbook inspired by words
Shared Sketchbook
This activity can be used to enable pupils to work independently to create pages which are then tied together to create a shared sketchbook.
Collect various types of paper (tracing, cartridge, brown paper etc), and tear or cut into the size of sketchbook pages. Punch holes with a hole punch.
The activity starts with a series of words which your teacher will provide you with.
Look at the words, and working alone, choose one which appeals to you, for whatever reason.
Once you have chosen your word, create a few pages inspired by that word. Remind that you can draw, sketch, write notes, draw diagrams, scribbles, collage, stick… All the things you would normally do in a sketchbook. Use both sides of each sheet of paper. Where possible, fill the whole sheet with your images/words – so the whole sheet sings out “red, or earth, or whatever your word was. Think sideways! That means if use choose red, and your first instinct is to reach for the red paint, then fine, but for your next page make a drawing which not only is red paint, but also red pencil scribbled in it. Think what the colour red makes you feel – and draw that too. Fill your pages full of energy.
When you are finished, tie all the pages your sketchbook group has made into one big book – using the plastic string provided. Put all the “red” sheets together, all the “earth” sheets together etc, and enjoy where different colours/feelings meet as one section starts and another ends. Enjoy how all your pages work individually and as a shared sketchbook. And don’t forget to document the results with the camera!
Making a Washing Line Sketchbook
Making a washing line sketchbook is a great class icebreaker exercise which gets children to actively experience some useful sketchbook skills. Getting older children to work with younger children, and involving teachers too, can really help the energy of the workshop.
The flash module below has been designed to use directly with your children to introduce them to the ideas. The transcript of the flash workshop is included below.
Transcript to Flash Module
1) Collecting!
In this part of the workshop you’re going to need to collect! But you’re going to collect in a new way – you’re going to collect words and pictures. Grab 10 or so sheets of paper and something to rest on. You’re going to explore an area (you teacher will tell you where). Work on your own (don’t follow your friend!) and we want you to look around really carefully. We want you to cover six sheets of paper with pictures, or words, or collages. Start by choosing something tiny and make a tiny picture. Then choose something a bit bigger, and make a picture, and carry on until you’ve made your six pictures and your last picture is of something much bigger. Use lots of materials – and don’t forget you can cut and stick, and write words, as well as draw – you can do what ever you like. Your teacher won’t tell you what to do!
BACK TO THE WASHING LINE – get yourself in a line and peg up your pictures – put all your pictures next to each other, but with no gaps between where your friends pictures stop and where your pictures start.
Stand back and admire your work!
2) Reflecting! Reflecting means thinking about what you have done
Staying in line, get into twos or threes, and ask each other these questions: Why did you choose to draw the things you drew? Why did you choose the materials you used? Why do you like or dislike them? Note down your answers on a sheet of paper and peg them up next to your work.
3) Reacting!
Now its time to mess it up! Wander up and down the line till you’ve seen everyone’s work. Then forget all about which pictures and yours and which are your friends – pretend you all own them all! Say to yourself: “I’m going to tidy this up a bit” and choose five or so pictures spread across the line which you think might be better pegged somewhere else. You might choose to rearrange images which share the same colours, or materials, or themes, or you might decide not to put things which are similar together, and instead to put images together which you think begin to tell a story. Any thing goes, as long as you’ve thought about it. If two of you want to rearrange the same pictures, don’t argue, have a quick chat about why you each want to move them, and see if you can come to an agreement!
4) Reflecting again. Stand back and enjoy the new order! How do you all feel?
5) Let the washing line enjoy an audience form the rest of the school, and then take a hole punch, unpeg the sheets in order, and lace them together to make a class or school sketchbook!
Please submit your comments re feedback and development of this module via the reply box below, or talk to other teachers about its practical use via the forum: . If you have any images of washing line sketchbooks made in your school, we’d love to show them on the site: please email us here
Starting with magazine imagery
Overview
When to use this activity
How to present this activity
See sketchbooks/images made this way
This activity was inspired by the working practices of Jonathon Ford and Madelaine Murphy. Both artists, working independently of each other, use imagery from magazines, books, news papers and pamphlets to help trigger thought processes and create imagery in their sketchbooks.
This workshop activity is a great way to generate content quickly, and so give pupils something which they can both reflect on and feel confident about. But just because the imagery comes relatively quickly, doesn’t mean it is meaningless. The element of personal choice is crucial to this activity. As pupils make choices about which kinds of imagery they want to select or collect, they are beginning to think about their likes, dislikes and personal preferences. As pupils sort the imagery, they begin to make decisions about presentation, context and meaning, and as they then work in to the imagery, and make it their own, they begin to experience what it is like to think laterally, to manipulate (a crucial skill), to invent (and re-invent), and to take responsibility for the way something is then seen, and the new meanings it presents.
This activity can be used in a variety of ways:
1. Having a wide variety of imagery available if vital. Magazines, old books, pamphlets, newspapers etc can all provide material – and the more variety the better in terms of subject matter, style, colour, media etc.
2. Have the imagery placed in the middle of the room.
3. Allow for serendipity – for example if the project has a theme, for example greek gods, don’t try to sort out imagery about that theme. Instead make sure that there’s plenty of variety of apparently unrelated imagery – which is more likely to lead to creative jumps, lateral thoughts and general inventiveness.
4. Invite pupils to collect and sort through images, making piles of likely images, before going on to re sort later. Make it a lively, noisy, communal session – tearing, sorting, swapping, telling.
5. Resorting through shortlisted imagery should be a more reflective, personal process. Try to get the pupils to tune in, and quieten down by creating more space (move unwanted imagery away) so pupils can think more clearly and decisively.
6. Give the pupils a target to work towards, for example to create five sketchbook pages. Unless this is being used as an activity purely in its own right (which is fine), pupils should also be clear about what it is they are trying to achieve via this activity (see When to use this activity, above).
7. Pupils should start to modify their chosen imagery, but cutting, folding, sticking and juxtapositioning, having an awareness of the sketchbook page as an arena or background to the imagery. Further modification of images can take place through pupils working over the top of the stick down images, by drawing, painting, scratching, writing and collaging. Pupils should be made aware of these different techniques so that they can make informed choices about how to modify (and be encouraged to invent new ways to modify). Pupils should also be encouraged to be aware (either at the time or on reflection), of the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, as they make other peoples images their own.
8. Throughout the processes of choosing, sorting, and modifying, pupils and teachers should be asking the following questions, to enable a deepening of the thought processes involved:
Asking the same questions in a more subjective and creative way might encourage children to see more clearly and openly, for example:
What would an alien, who had never seen this before, think of it?
If I saw it and it belonged to a different world, what would my reaction to it be?
9. Pupils should be given chance to reflect upon and share their choices, decisions, and outcomes.
See sketchbook imagery made this way
Pls leave your comments about this activity below, including thoughts about development, context and use. If you have used this activity with your pupils, pls send us images too via email here.
