Fifth Grade

Distance Learning

Please upload your work to google classroom. You can upload past due assignments there as well under the current weeks assignment and I will know which week it is for.

New Assignments will be added every week and will appear in order as you scroll down the page. I will leave past week's assignments up so you can always look back and catch up if you have fallen behind.

Week One Of Distance Learning:

Mythical Beasts

4/6-4/10

During Medieval times there was no understanding of the fact that some animals have gone extinct. There also was incomplete knowledge of animals that lived in far away places. If there were no elephants in the place where you lived then you maybe only heard stories about them or didn't know anything about them at all. Sometimes the bones of different creatures would get mixed up and when people were trying to piece the found skeletons back together they would get confused. Artists would try to imagine what these mixed up skeletons looked like when they were a living creature and because of all of this confusion they sometimes wound up inventing the mythical beasts we hear stories about today and that we find populating our favorite stories. Creatures like unicorns, dragons, mermaids, or centaurs just to name a few. When we look at many of these creatures we can see now how they are made up of parts from a couple of real animals and joined together to make one.

Your challenge this week is to choose two or three different animals and choose parts of them to mix together to create your own medieval mythincal creature! Maybe an elephant and hippo and a unicorn all get mixed together to create a Hippephanticorn? or a new creature is found called a Sharktopus. Try not to recreate already existing mythical creatures. Use your imagination and come up with your own.

Draw your mixed medieval mythical creature by looking up pictures of the creatures you are mixing together. Draw them lightly in pencil first and then you can always darken it up after you have sketched it out. In your drawing of your creature add lots of details. Let us know what this creature likes to do, eat, or where it lives!

When the drawing is complete add color. I'd love to see what you came up with. Send me a picture please!

Here are some photoshopped creatures just to get you started thinking.

The illusive Butterphant.

The fearsome Pandunk!

An angry Desert Spidat.

Here are some classics:

Second week of distance learning:

One point perspective drawing

4/13-4/17

Throughout the history of art people have struggled with translating what we experience in the world which we experience as three dimensional (things have height, width and length) to the flat world of a paper or canvas (things have height and width but no length). This has given rise to the development of illusions that help to convince people that a flat surface has that third dimension that it really doesn't. the more of these illusions we use in a drawing the more convincing and realistic a drawing becomes.

we are going to revisit one of these illusions this week to prepare us for a drawing we will do in the weeks to come of an inside space in our house the way we wish it looked. That means you could draw the space the way it is because you love it that way or you could change things about it however you want in your drawing. But more about that when you tune in next week!

For today, lets review what we already know about One Point Perspective. Before you start drawing you should know that this illusion is one that is a part of a bigger group called Linear Perspective. That just means we are using lines to draw a picture from our unique standpoint. There are other types of linear perspective like zero point perspective, two point perspective, three point perspective sometimes called aerial perspective or forced perspective, four point perspective, five point perspective, and lastly six point perspective which requires two drawings to be done in order to accomplish a 360 view of the subject of that drawing. Maybe someone will eventually come up with another type of linear perspective but that's what we have for now. Linear perspective was just being thought of towards the end of Medieval times and many art historians look to see if it was used in a drawing in order to put a date to the time the artist they are studying was working. If a drawing or painting has very well executed complicated use of linear perspective we can be pretty sure that they were not working during medieval times. Here are some artworks. Some are from medieval times and they predate artists knowledge and use of linear perspective, and the others are from after history moved out of medieval times when artists knew all about linear perspective. See if you can tell which paintings were done when!

I drew in the lines in the painting above so you can see that they all go to one point in the center of the painting. That proves that this artist was knowledgeable about the use of Linear perspective. They at least knew One Point Perspective even if they did not know the other types, but they probably knew a few of them.

Okay, let's get down to drawing!

First you need a pencil, eraser, paper, and a straight edge (could be a ruler or anything else that is straight like a large hard cover book) . No really, go find that stuff. I'll wait however long it takes. :)

Now hold your paper in the landscape position so it is nice and wide and use your straight edge to make a horizon line. Make that horizontal line somewhere just above the middle of your paper.

Now add in a dot somewhere on the horizon line. That is your vanishing point. That dot is the reason this technique is called One Point Perspective!

Now draw a square using your straight edge.

Now we are going to use our straight edge to make a line connecting the corners of our square to the vanishing point. These diagonal lines should be thought of as going away from us in space and so we call them by a different name. We call them orthagonal lines.

You can see that in my drawing I did not draw an orthagonal line to the bottom right corner of my square. That's because my square is not transparent like glass. It is opaque and so I can't see through it at all.

But look! my square is now a box! A very looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo (pause to breathe) oooooooonnnnnnnnnnng box.

Looking at this long box we can see that linear perspective is based off of one of the other illusions of depth called change of size. If I am standing next to an airplane it looks large but when it is flying in the sky it looks small. A star in the night sky looks tiny but is probably many times larger than our planet. Linear perspective gives us a correct mathematical way of showing the change in size something appears to have as it extends away from us in space! Yes. I snuck math into your art. :)

Try using the force to levitate a square above the line. This one is floating.

Don't forget to use your straight edge!!!!

I know what you are thinking. "But what happens if there is a shape that is resting on the ground and stretches up above the horizon line?" And now you are thinking "how did you know that I was thinking that Mr. Sloan! Get out of my mind!!"

Well it just means we will only connect the two corners on the right side of the square so we see the one side of that long box.

This is exactly the same as if the square were directly underneath the vanishing point. Except then we would connect only the two top corners of the square and we would see the front and top of the long box. So if you drew a square directly under the vanishing point and were wondering how to connect the corners to the vanishing point wonder no longer. just turn your head 90 degrees and look at the picture right next to all these words!

Now what if we don't want the box to be so long? we can give the box a back by drawing lines that look just like the front further along the orthagonals towards the vanishing point. Notice that the front left side of the box is a vertical line and so is the line I just drew.

Now the top of the front of the box is a horizontal line that is parallel to the Horizon line so the line I drew for the top back of the box is also. You should be able to cut out the front square that you started with and slide it back along the orthagonals and fit it right into the two lines you just drew.

Okay, now erase the extra orthagonals going all the way back to the vanishing point and that box is done.

Sometimes this happens too. A box is floating a bit in this picture and it makes it so we can't see all of the long box next to it on the right.

There are other shapes besides squares you know. Try making other shapes appear to be three dimensional in the same way.

If you are feeling like a challenge then try some other shapes too like stars or hearts or block letters.

Hope you had fun with this weeks distance learning!

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