In January, with the start of the spring semester, I deepened my approach to teaching basic drawing skills to my art 1 students. While they were not necessarily thrilled with this decision, they quickly saw the benefits to adding the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” techniques. It’s something that I have wanted to do for years, but trying to fit in such a hands on approach during the middle of contest season just never seemed to work. But this year, I decided that even though I couldn’t do all of the steps, I could at least do the basic introductory steps.

I have Betty Edwards workbook and have adapted her lessons to fit a high school classroom. Her workbook is phenomenal and I wish we had time to do the entire book. (If I had just a drawing class, this is absolutely what we would do!) I take her concepts and teach basically the first five or six lessons.

What is truly amazing is that these techniques, because they are visual lessons and not language dependent work for ALL students of ALL abilities. Given that my classes are made of mixed abilities from the valedictorian to the non-speaking life skills student, I truly value lessons that work for all students!

Over a couple of weeks, my students learned to see every day objects with new eyes. They learned how to use a simple transparency to transform their drawings. They learned how to break large concepts into small manageable segments. And oh man, it has changed the way my students view drawing!

After working through basic lessons, I took a couple of my daughter’s old bicycles up to the school and set them up for the students to draw. Students then took their drawings and enlarged them onto a 18×24 piece of paper that they then had to create a positive and negative pattern on. This felt like it took forever.

But the projects are fantastic! This is the first drawing project where almost every one of my students were not only successful, but created a quality piece of art! Students that are frequent fliers in detention worked bell to bell for weeks on this piece! How I wish I could show you all 100 pieces and tell you the story of every student while you looked at their piece.

But I can’t. So I’ll show you a few really cool pieces.

So anyway, I just had to share this success story. It’s so gratifying when going that extra mile and doing that extra hard thing is rewarded. That’s a rare thing in education!

And the next time I want to set aside the lesson plans and take a few extra days to teach in a more meaningful way, I am going to remember this feeling and these results and give myself the grace to go rogue.

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