By Jan Miller

Jan Miller is an Art and Design teacher with more than 25 years’ experience working in formal education settings, currently teaching ages 4-15.  In this resource, facilitated with Year 8, learners were challenged to create observational and expressive drawings of insects set inside resin cubes, focusing on scale and materials.

The activity consisted of two one-hour sessions in which learners first worked on a small scale to explore the potential of different materials before moving on to larger drawings using a spontaneous, bold, and expressive approach. The distortion of the insects within the cubes, combined with the unusual angles and shifts in scale, made them ideal subjects for expressive drawing.

This activity celebrates messy, experimental, and individual responses, guiding learners through an exploratory journey with materials towards the creation of a finished piece.

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What We Like About This Resource

“I love this resource because I can picture the energy in the classroom whilst students enjoy the process of mark-making using their feet. Creating drawings with parts of the body other than hands can be really freeing; students will hopefully look at their drawings in a less critical way, with the emphasis of the activity being more about the process than the outcome. It might be a nice addition to use a viewfinder to zoom in on areas where the marks collide in interesting ways” – Tobi, AccessArt.

What We Like About This Resource….

“This activity walks through a number of different processes and taps into multiple skills.This provides a rich exploratory project for children to fully immerse themselves in. Cezanne was the focus artist for this project, but other contemporary still life painters could be used as starter inspiration. We actually advocate showing the work of more than one artist as this builds knowledge of how approaches to painting, drawing etc differ. This also helps children move towards a personal response rather than creating a ‘copy’ of one particular artist’s work” – Rachel, AccessArt

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What We Like About This Resource….

“It’s always so inspiring to hear how different artists work and we particularly like the detailed references Jake makes to his process – marking out the composition using neutral tones; adding and taking away compositional elements and gradually building in more colour and detail. Delivering a still life session in a classroom could begin with this process and encourage the practice of looking at positive and negative space. Some suggested resources below also touch on this”. – Rachel, AccessArt

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