Sunday, November 6, 2011

Floating Spheres

I have seen a lot of examples of "floating spheres" on the internet (Artsonia, blogs, Google images) and can't believe that in all my years of teaching I have never tried them with my students!! Well, this is the week!

I've played around with various versions all week-end and finally settled on one that builds on last week's lesson where we shaded cylinders and ultimately arranged them "outside the frame". Our spheres (or at least one or two of them) will be outside the parameters of the original square.

We'll start with a small square (probably 5" X 5"), make a vanishing point and then extend wavy (or straight) sections outward to color.

Next we'll make some spheres using pencil and crayon.

We'll cut them out and glue them on our initial square.

Then the real fun starts. I want the kids to place their square randomly on their larger paper and extend a few of their black rays changing the color to a color from the color wheel. Ideally, they will be able to choose colors demonstrating some knowledge of Color Theory (ie. primary, secondary, warm, cool, etc.). If there is time we will also be shading the edges of the colored sections to give them some dimension.

After gluing the original square in place, students will have the choice of cutting out and gluing the whole thing on another paper. Voila! Hope it all works in 45 minutes!:)

7 comments:

  1. oooohhh - fun! I think my kids would have fun with this!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love this idea and so will the kiddos!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looks great, but ALL OF THIS in 45 minutes??!! My kids would take more than that long to color in the black stripes and the shade the spheres.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Phyl - You are right!! I'm not sure how far we'll get in one session. I'm pretty sure they'll get the stripes and spheres done and that alone will be fine mounted. I have some groups that work more efficiently than others and I am thinking that they will get to the colored part. If not, there's always next week:)

    ReplyDelete
  5. so cool! I also love the regatta boats. So happy to find you on pintrest!

    ReplyDelete