Week 3- Watercolor Narratives

"Johnny on the woodpile,
Johnny on the fence
Johnny got a haircut
For fifteen cents."

This was the narrative that the student selected to draw for her sketchbook assignment. At first, she had just the figure and green marks, but then I asked her what else she could add to that helped to tell the story she read. She continued to add the blue marks and flowers. The most interesting part of this drawing is what she had transformed it into in the artwork on the left. The students were told to recreate their sketchbook narrative onto the watercolor marks. Look at the wonderful changes!You can see the evolution of ideas that already existed in the preliminary drawing. The oval shapes she described to be the woodpile and happily pointed out the wonderful mohawk haircut of the figure. It seemed as though in the second project that the student extended her ideas from the first drawing in a more creative and exploratory way. Whereas in the sketchbook drawing, the initial confines of illustrating a narrative might have influenced her ideas and level of creativity. This image is a great example of the progression of the student's thought process and ability to combine old and new ideas into one artwork.




When the students were working on the collaborative mark-making exercise, there was a low mumble of sound effects filling the classroom as the students vocalized what sounds the marks made. For example, this student picked the emotion, "jealous", and would make aggressive sharp, short marks each accompanied by her saying "jealous, jealous" quickly followed by "Andele! Andele! I love scribbling!" Many students did the same thing where they combined a vocal and kinesthetic reaction to the marks they were making.

A challenge with using "mark-making" as a unit theme is to help students realize the differences between just scribbling and deliberate mark-making. There was a wonderful moment of dialogue about this during a discussion about Cy Twombly's marks in his drawings. The question was raised:

Teacher:"So what is the difference between scribble and marks?"
Student:"Marks are when you are focusing. When you think about the mark."
Student" Scribbles are when you are having fun. They are when you are not thinking."

It is interesting that the student attributed "fun" to scribbling and not to mark-making. However, the fact that they realized you need to focus more for making marks shows that they realized the difference that certain marks need more thinking then just the innate, kinesthetic reaction of drawing scribbles on the paper. Discovering and exploring the boundaries between scribbling and "mark-making" will continue to unfold in different forms each week.









While students worked in this collaborative setting, there was an exchange of teaching and learning happening within each group individually. Each member of the group saw each others' marks and some responded to them by repeating them while others made up an opposite form of that mark. At different times within the activity, different students rose up as leaders and facilitated the activity as well. One student noticed that only one half of the paper was being filled with marks, so she took the initiative to turn the paper in order for them the fill the other side with marks.