Mystery Collaborative Grid Drawing

This project was with my Art 1 students. Before we did this project we spent the week talking and learning about value and shading with a pencil. I gave a short introduction on the day we did this project by talking about what a grid drawing is and about how proportions are important when drawing from a grid.

To prep for this project, I found 4 photos online for the kids to draw. I then put each drawing into a word document and put a grid on top of the picture by inserting a "table" into the document. Next, I printed the photos off, labeled them with a number and letter, and then cut them up.

For the instructions, I gave each kid a 9 by 9 inch piece of paper. I then randomly gave out all the little pieces of the grid drawing. On the back of each piece of the grid there was a number and letter which would tell us later where the piece fit into the picture. So, to keep things organized, I had the kids label their paper with the same number and letter.

They had one class period (40 minutes) to complete their piece of the grid. Many of them tried to guess what the picture was but I made sure not to let on until it was time for them to piece it together.

The next day I had the class work together to assemble the picture. Meanwhile, I had two kids cutting out paper to the right dimensions so that we could tape the pictures down to something. Once they had the thing put together then I let them see the actual photograph so that they could check to see that all the pieces were in the right spot.