8th graders in art tech class continue to advance on their Stations of the Cross pencil and pen drawings, which they will soon develop into colorful digital images. Grids and pencil marks are visible in some of the drawings shown here, while some have black marker pen lines and white spaces that have been electronically “cleaned up” in the Sketchbook app on students’ iPads. Although our students employ modern electronic technology to develop their images, the basis of their work on this project is the ancient drawing method of carefully observing and analyzing a subject, and using tools (pencil and pen) to transfer visual information to a physical surface (cardstock).
For this project, students have drawn grids with 1/2-inch squares on small prints of illustrations by contemporary artist Shari Van Vranken. They have made proportionate grids with 1-inch squares on their drawing papers in order to scale up the images which they are observing. This method was widely used by artists during the Renaissance to scale up drawings to larger formats.
