Today was a continuation of our measuring exercises and we took them one step further where we measured larger distances with our bodies, strides, shadows and steps. We took a series of photographs to record this.
We used teaching walk to discuss the ideas. The weather was nice and the nature of Suomenlinna was quite inspiring. There were only three students in this exercise as the others were completing their projects and portfolios inside. Egle decided to demonstrate the idea of measuring with our bodies by 'walking' with her body along a certain path to see how many times her body fits in the length of the path. We took a series of photos of that.
The students found many creative ideas how to measure with their bodies by using strides to climb the rocks or measure their shadow along the certain distance. I guess this was also an example of learning by doing in a natural studying environment and by direct action.
The purpose of this exercise was to make the students more aware of their bodies and how they fit into the surrounding space. These exercises are also used in classical drawing to help artists understand the proportions better.
After the images were taken and the students had enough material and examples we went inside and carried on with the group discussion about the images and what we thought worked and what perhaps did not work so well. In the second part of the lesson I have prepared an exercise on drawing negative space; negative space is the area of the picture plain that is outside the main subject of the image, the shapes and spaces that define the subject and various elements within the drawing.
This exercise was quite challenging in many ways and we had an installation with a plant and a sculpture head to draw from. The task was carried out well by most of the students and it was a good observational challenge.
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