Optical Illusion Art

As promised here is one of the art projects that we did over the last month (in my opinion it took us WAY too long to get finished... still looking for a way to keep all the kids at relatively the same point in a project.

We always have art right after recess (and use 2 periods for it... which means it takes us till lunch).  They also will often come in and expect to be given a chance to eat their snack inside the classroom.  For the first month of school I obliged with a snack and story time but now they either eat it outside or eat it while I'm talking to them about what we will be doing that class. 

 Ain't nobody got time for snack and story.  

Anyways, we started this lesson when snack and story was still very much in existence in our room.

I had gone to the public library in the city to pick up 3 books for this lesson on optical illusions.

The pictures in these books are amazing.  Depending on how you look at them you might see 2 different things.  The students enjoyed trying to see the 2 different ways to see each picture.  I then put all 3 books on the back counter in our room and students could look at them when they had free time or reading time.

 They loved them.  

Then I turned on the projector and showed them different kinds of optical illusions.  They really enjoyed the old lady vs. young lady one... mostly because I had forgotten how to find the young lady (we never figured it out that class so one boy went home, printed off a picture of it, and came back to school the next day to show me how to see it).

cup/profile illusion

old/young lady illusion

How many feet does the elephant have?

Then we just did a quick google image search for Escher together and the students picked different pictures they wanted me to click on to see larger.

By now they were long done their snack and ready to get into an art project.  I started by getting them to take out a pencil, ruler, and passed out a plain white piece of paper.

I pulled up this website on the projector and for the most part we simply followed along with what it said and my amazing rendition of the drawing on the board.

STEP 1:

Put a small dot on your page.  Anywhere on your page.

STEP 2:

Make an even number of straight lines coming out of this dot (they used their ruler) to help with this most of them took the suggestion to just draw one long line that would pass through the dot... you are guaranteed an even number of lines this way.  I told them not to make more than 14 lines total (the more lines you have the more work it will be later on).

I drew my version of this nice and big on the board

STEP 3:

To help students with this next part I labelled my sections on the board (in this example I had 8 sections). I told them to draw "happy faces" on all the odd sections (every other section in their drawing) and showed them what I meant by this (basically a curved line).  I walked around the room to make sure everyone was skipping a section and doing this correctly which was when I noticed that one of my students actually drew happy faces in every other section.  Whoops.

STEP 4:

On the even sections they did frowning faces (or curved lines going the opposite way).  I guess the frowning faces vs happy faces only works if you rotate your paper while you are drawing... my students were rotating their paper.

STEP 5:

Pick your colours!

I pulled up a picture of a colour wheel on the projector and we talked about complimentary colours (if you don't know complimentary colours are those that are on opposite sides of the colour wheel).  To make things easy we said that blue was opposite orange, purple was opposite yellow, and green was opposite red.  Once they picked one colour the other colour they would use would be easy.. just look to the other side of the wheel.  They took out these colours in markers and ones that matched their markers in pencil crayons.

STEP 6:

Start colouring!

Every other section would be the same colour (so in my this examples case all odd sections would be blue and even sections would be orange.  THEN you only colour every other part in that section.  I went back to my huge example on the board to demonstrate what I meant.  Most got it... some got a little confused.  A lot of my students dabbed a little colour on each part they needed to colour so they wouldn't get confused.

This was pretty well how far we got the first day but with the magic of the blog I'll just continue acting like we were super colourers and were able to get the entire lesson done in one day and not 4 (or more).  

STEP 7:

Once they finished colouring I had them use their pencil crayons to do some shading between each coloured part.  Just because I thought it might look better (and I also read it on the linked page)

STEP 8:

I gave them an index card and told them to write on it what they thought it looked like. I told them to trim their cards afterwards (most forgot about that though) and then glue it on their picture somewhere that it wouldn't be in the way.

Voila!  We were done!