Daily Art Integration
In August, the staff at Detroit Prep and our sister school, Detroit Achievement Academy participated in a professional development session on integrating art into the classroom every day. The session was facilitated and planned by myself and the DAA art teacher extraordinaire, Erin Brott. The hour-long session followed a question and answer session with local superstar artist Phil Simpson, who stuck around after his talk to create some art with us. It was the most joyous and creative afternoon.
The reason Erin and I wanted to put together this PD session is to ensure and support all of our staff in having art planning tools so that they feel comfortable creating more art with the students in their Crewrooms. To do that, we decided we wanted to teach the teachers an art lesson that they could teach to the students. Some of the things we considered were the materials available, level of difficulty of the art making we wanted to share and how engaging the students would find the lesson. We landed on the art practice of Blind Contour Drawings.
Blind Contour Drawings are an exercise that is frequently used in art schools both at the high school and college level. The exercise is designed to get the art to look at an object or subject carefully, release attachment to outcomes and to improve drawing skills. Essentially, the artist chooses a subject to draw. It could be anything in the room–a person, a plant and set up still life etc. Once the subject is selected and arranged, the artist draws the subject in one continuous line, without looking at their paper or lifting their drawing tool. Usually the artist will use a drawing tool that can not be erased to help keep the focus on drawing their subject rather than erasing any mistakes. At the end of the exercise, the final drawing will somewhat resemble the person, place or things the artist was looking at in a series of scribbly lines.
This activity was a smash success with both schools staff members. Our team felt nervous at first, as do most people when they first try this out. I think the nerves were extra high because we decided to have them draw each other rather than an object. Once they got going though, we had so much fun! It was wonderful to walk around and observe my colleagues getting out of their comfort zone to find their artistic learning edge. There was laughter, silly poses and lovely getting to know each other conversations with beautiful completed art pieces. The cherry on top of our art integration time was learning that Phil Simpson developed his signature smiley face art subject through a blind contour drawing series he had to complete while in college.
I’m so glad that Erin and I got the opportunity to teach our community about integrating arts into the classroom more and set them up for success in doing so. The time we spent is one of my favorite career memories and I’m very hopeful to see some beautiful blind contour drawing and other artwork created outside of the art classroom.
