What to do with a line

Okay, so the more I look at what I assigned last quarter, the more I realize that maybe I do have an evil side.  But I think all teachers have to have a little devil in them when it comes to finding challenging projects.

Anyways,  I was inspired by the video that was running across facebook that featured a mom letting her daughter scribble on paper and then she would turn it into amazing works of art.  Well I thought about going down to our kindergarten and having those students draw us some lines, but with it being so late in the year I thought their lines might be too refined for what I had in mind.  So instead I made the advanced students make the lines.

I know that sounds like a contradiction.  I was worried about too refined lines from kindergarten but I let advanced art students create the lines?  You are probably thinking I went mad, but I promise I was completely sane.  Before they came in I laid out paper for everyone, I put brushes on the tables and dishes of black paint.  When they came in I had them sit by a piece of paper and grab a brush.  This was my only mistake, I gave them too big of brushes.  I then told them to dip the brush in the paint and draw a line.  Of course, they had to ask a million questions as to what kind of line, and I finally just had to tell them to make a dang line on the paper.  After they made one line, I had them move to another piece of paper and make a line on that paper.  And then so on and so forth.  I didn't have them do all of the papers, but each student made a mark on about half of the papers in the room.

Then they were all told to go back to their original and figure out what to do with it.  They could add more lines to create shapes, they could add color with paint, watercolor, chalk or any other medium, and they needed to find a way to make it their own.  Some of them had challenging lines to work with, but here are a few of my favorites.

Jacob K.

Carter H.

Courtney M.

Emily H.

Paige Q.