"Drawing With Light" at the NHAEA Fall Conference 2013

It's that time of the year again! Fall colors and the NH Art Educator's Assoc. Fall Conference!

I love going to the conference and connecting with art teachers from all over the state! It's truly inspiring! And this year was no exception!

My morning session was "Using Photography in the Elementary Classroom." This session was led by Katie Poor, a teaching artist currently working at the Providence Children's Museum. She began by describing a lesson on cyanotypes that she teaches. Then she walked us through a very interesting lesson where she teaches children to "Draw With Light" using flashlights and digital cameras. She brought in some digital cameras of her own and we spent the remainder of the session experimenting with the technique.

She showed us a few examples--the most famous, I guess, would be Picasso from LIFE magazine in 1949. Check out the link to see all of the inspiring images...

We experimented by making shapes, squiggles, letters, drawing images (which are actually harder than it looks), and entire words...while we played, I think we all started thinking of ways this could be used across the curriculum.

My session partner and I experimented with using the white board and a dry erase marker to draw the idea first (either an image or a word) and then use the flashlight in our hand to "trace" the dry erase marker lines we had made on the board. You can see an example of this further in this post (the "art rocks" image) and a few more of our experiments on Katie's blog (link below). We were MUCH more successful doing our "drawings" this way versus trying to imagine an image and draw it freehand in front of us like Picasso did. After trying to draw freehand, I REALLY appreciated Picasso's drawing with light images!

To check out the photos from the session and see what we did, click on Katie's link:
http://photographerintheclassroom.tumblr.com
And just look for the most recent posts (there are two that contain our examples).

I was fortunate to bring my camera from home to the session (it was in my mobile art closet/minivan so I was able to grab it). I had Katie advise me on setting my aperture and shutter speed and, although my camera isn't as fancy as the ones she brought (her cameras allow for 30 seconds of exposure, but mine allows only 16 seconds), I was able to go home and have my children "Draw With Light" a bit.

This is such a fun lesson, I really think I'll need to get into a classroom and teach this soon!

Thanks, Katie, for the great idea!

This should say "art rocks" but my my camera only allows for
a shutter speed of 16 seconds--I bet I could have traced the whole
word if I had tried again (the more successful attempt is on Katie's blog).

3-year-old draws a circle

6-year-old tries for a square
(it's harder than it looks!)

6-year-old tries for a star