Grade 5/6 Hand Study

This is a beautiful project based on this hand, originally painted by notkaychan on deviantart.

This painting is just stunning, and immediately got me excited. I love the idea of drawing hands because, while it's so difficult to do, it's great to practice drawing something that you can look at and manipulate and touch and feel.

We did a practice run the day before, drawing our hands from sight (but lightly tracing them first to make sure the dimensions were accurate.)  They changed features that didn't seem right, adding bends and curves where they were required. Then, they studied the lines in their hands, picking out only the important, thick lines to include in their hand (too many details didn't seem to do them well.)

When we did the real project, they followed the same process, only this time, we used nice watercolor paper. Once they had drawn them in pencil, they used a thin Sharpie to trace the lines. To paint, students used watercolors, focusing on analogous colors, and BLENDING as much as they could. This was the real challenge of the whole project - students spend over an hour meticulously painting these hands, trying so hard to get the blending just right so that it seemed as though one color washed into the next.

The results are stunning. This was a tough project, and they did well. I am really proud of them!

Every class has the student whose mind is just to creative to control - mine came up with this monster hand below, and honestly, when I do this project again, I will definitely take it in that direction!You have to love the student who is more creative than the teacher!