Curls of my dreams.

Curls of my dreams. Toward the beginning of each school year, I review basics that mydrawing class may have forgotten over the summer, making sureeveryone's mind is refreshed, and that we all understand theconcepts that make drawings believable and compositionally interesting. We review contour, continuous line, sketches and thumbnailsketches. These thumbnail sketches provide us with smallrectangles--both horizontal and vertical--in which to"compose" the space for our work. We review how to render an object, talk about lighting and itseffect on what it hits, and how invaluable it is for the artist. Wereview how an object reacts to light, not forgetting the power of"reflected" light and cast shadow--those shapes that suggesttheir origin, but do so much to indicate three-dimensionality. We create a value scale with pencil, from very dark to the brightwhite of the paper, with the myriad shades in between. We are ready! I'm always looking for something that will trigger my interestand that I can then make interesting for my students. I dislikerepeating assignments, and rarely do. I may do a self-portrait in everydrawing class, but it's never handled the same way. I always lookfor a different twist. This led me to ribbons. They're lovely and the curvilinear curvilineara line appearing as a curve; nonlinear.curvilinear regressionsee curvilinear regression. lines are fluid and beautiful. I've used ribbons with my watercolorstudents and have had great results, but I wanted to try something evenmore unusual. I experimented with torn paper. Heavier paper gave a softdeckle-like edge, but couldn't be controlled to make uniformwidths. Newsprint tears easily, but didn't have enough body tostand up. Finally, I found a thinner watercolor paper that would tear,and stand up in a curling fashion. The stage was set with several curls--all white, some on theirside, Some interacting with other loops, some on the outskirts of thecomposition. A direct light source made dramatic shadows and filteredthrough the paper, giving ambitious students something to sink theirartistic teeth into. This was a difficult assignment. The kids--despite not beingtotally sold on the idea of paper curls--did their best. I gave them achoice of three techniques on two different surfaces of paper. Onechoice of paper was slate gray Slate gray is a gray with a slight azure tinge. See alsoList of colors • ; the other two techniques were on a whitesulfite sulfite/sul��fite/ (sul��fit) any salt of sulfurous acid. sul��fiten.A salt or ester of sulfurous acid. . Those who chose the gray paper used charcoal pencil, and when readyto call the work complete, used soft white pastel for "punch."The students who chose the white paper surface could either render theirwork in graphite, using their array of pencils, or use a"chiaroscuro chiaroscuro(kyärōsk`rō)[Ital.,=light and dark], term once applied to an early method of printing woodcuts from several blocks and also to works in black and white or monotone. " technique. Chiaroscuro is an Italian termmeaning light and shade. Several students chose the pencil rendering because they werefamiliar with the shading technique and knew how to employ a variety ofvalues. But, oddly enough, I believe this was the most difficult choice.The shading had to be so subtle because the paper curls were white onwhite paper. Those students who chose the chiaroscuro technique used the art ofRembrandt, LaTour and Caravaggio, whose works appear to emerge from theshadows, as examples. Students were instructed to shade the surface ofthe white paper with vine charcoal, then erase out the highlights,eventually adding some darker, richer areas where the paper curled awayfrom the light or was interrupted by other curls. We spent a lot of time examining the shadows--how dark they wereclosest to the curls, and how the shadows change value and shape as theyget farther from their source. The resulting drawings are lyrical; some are potent in theirdramatic values, others subtly inferred. These drawings are lovelycompositions that loop, twirl and twist through light and shadow;they're the curls of which dreams are made. Geri Greenman is head of the art department at Willowbrook HighSchool Willowbrook High School, or WBHS, is a public four-year high school located approximately half a mile North of Illinois Route 38 on Ardmore Ave in Villa Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. in Villa Park Villa Park,village (1990 pop. 22,253), Du Page co., NE Ill.; inc. 1914. It is a residential suburb W of Chicago. , Ill., and is a Contributing Editor A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. for Arts &Activities. Photographs by student Rebecca Johnson.