Drawing Houses – the project conclusion.

Zoe & I pulled together the end of the house drawing project over two half days in the last week. The kids have learned loads, that is clear and we’re all ready to move on now. I’ve been so impressed by them all for plugging away at stretching new skills, particularly mine, who really haven’t got the intrinsic artistic flare of Poppy and Skye, though they do well enough in their own way and Maddy would do even better if she could relax. (Not sure whether to laugh or sigh at that.)

We decided to just do a couple more 3D house drawing  exercises to warm them up again on the first day, but lack of motivation all round meant that was all we did.  We pulled both from ArtProjectsForKids again.

The first as an extension of the street scenes we had done before but this time adding depth to the buildings using some of the 3D skills they’d built up.

Then we tried this ‘American Grid Town’ idea, which was a good bit harder than it looked so the results really did them credit. Getting the streets and ‘lots’ in proportion and then the houses in on top took a good bit of thinking about. I dunno about Zoe’s but my 4 have all had a lot of practise at using rulers this last couple of weeks!

This week, as we really wanted to finish off, we got them to do a step by step version of a 1 point perspective road scene, since they had mostly (it seemed!) grasped the idea of two point perspective.

Zoe led them through this (totally beyond me!) and although there was plenty of grumbling, they did all do a good job. They needed help, but it isn’t like we’re doing Architect Academy 😉 so I think we felt that this was all they really needed. I think one of the biggest things they’ve all learned is that even an apparently difficult task and even something apparently ‘artistic’ has rules to follow which makes it easier.

As a last, fairly rushed, task, they did their Lego houses in whatever style they felt like.

This has been a really good project. The finer points have inspired them to greater or lesser degrees but they’ve all achieved lots. Amelie has been hugely taken with 2 point perspective and she and I spent a good bit of the morning looking at ways of manipulating the rules to give different results.

We also googled for artist impressions of housing new-builds and got both drawings and pictures of estates. It was really interesting to look at them and help her spot the places she would need to put in vanishing points and find the lines that had been used to draw them. She really got it.

Image Credit: Greywell Property. This was the image that inspired her to have a go at the ‘separated blocks’ drawing above (with me) – she really got it.