Drawing: Growing artists
This unit focuses on teaching children the use of shapes, shading, and texture in art to enhance their drawing skills. It emphasises developing a sense of light and dark, using frottage for texture, and experimenting with different tools to create expressive and abstract art. Use this unit hub to inform your medium-term plan and to navigate to related resources.
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Drawing: Growing artists
Unit outcomes
Pupils who are secure will be able to:
- Know the difference between organic and geometric shapes.
- Use simple shapes to form the basis of a detailed drawing.
- Use shading to demonstrate a sense of light and dark in their work.
- Shade with a reasonable degree of accuracy and skill.
- Blend tones smoothly and follow the four shading rules.
- Collect a varied range of textures using frottage.
- Use tools competently, being willing to experiment.
- Generate ideas mostly independently and make decisions to compose an interesting frottage image.
- Make considered cuts and tears to create their ideas.
- Understand how to apply tone, with some guidance about where to use it.
- Draw a framed selection of an image onto a large scale with some guidance.
- Try a range of drawing materials, beginning to demonstrate expressive marks by trying tools in an interesting way.
Suggested prior learning
Drawing: Tell a story
Get startedLessons
Lesson 1: See like an artist
- To recognise how artists use shape in drawing.
Lesson 2: Shading
- To understand how to create tone in drawing by shading.
Lesson 3: Texture pictures
- To understand how texture can be created and used to make art.
Lesson 4: Botanical drawing
- To apply observational drawing skills to create detailed studies.
Lesson 5: Abstract flowers
- To explore composition and scale to create abstract drawings.
Key skills
Key knowledge
Related content
Resources
Unit resources
Cross-curricular opportunities
Mathematics: Geometry – properties of shapes
Science: Light, Plants