More to See and Touch - Visual and Tactile Features 2        

Question for Understanding
What texture and form in space did the maker use?           

Activity Ideas for All Students
Explain that students will be learning about how some artists make three-dimensional objects (that have height, width, and depth) and how others work on flat, two-dimensional surfaces and sometimes create illusions of solid form and space.  Compare a circle and square cut from construction paper with a sphere (ball) and cube (block or box) to illustrate the difference between two-dimensions and three-dimensions.   

Show the DVD segment, “More to See and Touch,” asking students to watch for real texture, form, and space and for illusions of texture, form, and space. Give students practice and feedback by using some or all of the interactive “More to See and Touch” CD activities, which you can project for an entire class or which individual students can view in a computer lab. Students can use the CD to 1) review what they learned on the DVD, 2) apply what they learned to their everyday visual world, and 3) recognize how inquiry into three-dimensional features applies to old and new art.

Ask each student to bring a small, interesting, everyday object to class and write a description of its form, surface texture, and interaction with surrounding space.  Students should NOT mention color, function, subject matter, or the materials from which the objects are made.

Divide the class into groups and collect each group’s objects in a bag, into which you have previously placed one or two distracting objects (seashell, bolt, electric plug adaptor, rock, feather, small pencil sharpener, or the like).  Hand the bag and descriptive cards to another group and instruct the group to display the objects in a row and read each description slowly, word by word, till they can match the descriptions with the objects.  Students should black out (so it cannot be read) any reference to color, function, subject matter, or the materials in the descriptions, revise descriptions to make them more specific and accurate, and pass the bag of objects and descriptions on to the next group for matching.

Activity Ideas for Art Students
Ask students to experiment with modeling clay, plaster carving, papier mache, ceramics, or other three-dimensional medium to create interesting masses, interactions of mass with space, and/or surface textures. The activity is more meaningful if combined with another question focused of possible sources for ideas, such as culture, personal life, environment, etc.

Complementary Activities from Stories of Art
A K-12 curriculum resource from CRIZMAC

• The theme, Farm Folk City Folk, is based on “Kag and the River People,” a story of a young man whose grasp of the value of precious containers (small symmetrical forms) contributes to the planning of a new city (organization of various large forms in space).

• The theme, Powerful Families, is based on “Lord of the West” a story of a young woman whose beautifully embroidered sash (texture) symbolizes her feeling for the young man she admires.