5: How (Chuck) Close Can You Get?

I'm really challenging the fifth graders this year. Now that they have a good basic understanding of art, I want to focus on their creative thinking and problem solving skills. The first project we started working on dealt with the artist Chuck Close. Close uses a grid technique, meaning he breaks his canvas down into small squares, when he paints. I took pictures of celebrities (Barak Obama, Taylor Swift, etc) and cut the image into 20 equal squares. Each student got a square without knowing who their celebrity was. Then they had a square piece of paper. They had to use enlargement techniques to draw their square the size of the paper. We then created a value scale and practiced our shades and shadowing. These techniques were then applied to their drawings. Finally, I collected all their drawings and put their image together so we could figure out who each class had as their celebrity!