Gesture drawings

In our classroom, we talk a lot about “how to see,” and “how to look.” As creative and critical thinkers, our students must learn not just to speed through places and experiences, but develop tools to more thoughtfully look at a situation, problem, space, or topic, and see both the details and the greater context.

Adam, dissecting an image with point-line-plane

To begin to exercise these “seeing” muscles, we did a series of lectures on Color Theory, Gestural Drawing, and Point-Line-Plane (the basics of 2d design). These 3 lectures were accompanied by related exercises, including gesture drawings of images (5 seconds to represent its essence!), drawing the hand in 5-, 30-, and 60-second timeframes, and most notably, an exercise using the Curious Terrain Explorer’s Deck, “a creative toolbox for discovering and recording places.”

The deck was developed by a Portland-based designer named Jenny Marx who we met recently. It is divided into 3 sections: Discover, Record, and Wild Card. Discover cards might include “Sound,” asking students to listen for specific sounds and write a soundtrack to reflect the nature of the place, or “Paths,” asking students to observe and follow paths, both natural and manmade. Record cards ask students to interpret those observation, like “Postcard,” in which students have to represent and celebrate the place in a single image. Wild Cards are fun addenda, like “Through Others’ Eyes,” in which students must envision the place through the eyes of a dog, child, or bird, for example.

We sent students out in pairs, each to a different place, either in our own class space (the woodshop, metalshop), or in the surrounding area (the tennis courts, softball field, forest behind our barn, etc). With 3 Discover, 1 Record, and 1 Wild Card in hand, they spent one hour in the place, noting their observations and creating a record of those observations.

Raleigh and Leanna, for example, chose a space at the side of our building, which centered around an old pile of bricks covered in vines (showed above). They traced the paths throughout the space, around the building, on a paved path approaching the building, and most interestingly, the path of the shadow cast by the building’s roof, which, they noted, changed throughout the day but always led past the pile of bricks (which they found intriguing and beautiful). Davis and April discovered some similar brick-related clues on the other side of the building, where the trace of a paint marking on the building read “Bricklaying Shop” (below). Davis’ father had mentioned to him a few days prior that he himself had attended masonry classes in our building in the early 80′s. Davis, April, Raleigh, and Leanna, together unraveled the mystery of the building, the pile of old bricks, the traces of previous inhabitants, and the legacy of the building which we are now reinventing.

Meanwhile, at the softball field, Ryann and Desiree used their “Traces” card to track down evidence of human imprints on the place. They photographed litter, stones marking the numbers and names of celebrated softball players, and the peeling paint on the bleachers. They found the markings both evidence of disrespect for the place, but more so heavy use from a sincere love of the place, school, students, and athletes. Ryann describes their findings in the video below (and she photographed the bleacher paint beautifully below as well).

The point of this exercise was not for students to stare at peeling paint, but to deliberately go to a place and see new things, with intent and an open mind, through different lenses. As we move into architecture and design projects, this skill will be crucial in understanding a context from an analytical standpoint, but also in seeing possibility in what initially might appear to be uninspiring. We continue to “learn to see” every day when we know how to look.