Drawings with Mass: Potatoes, Playmobil and Henry Moore
By Paula Briggs.
Children aged 6 to 10 had great fun making drawings inspired by sculptor Henry Moore. Many thanks to the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green for permission to use the images by Moore.
Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation archive
We started off with an introduction to Henry Moore and some of his drawings. I introduced the children to the idea that many of Moore’s sculptures were large in scale, and that he was interested in mass, volume, material and gravity. We talked about how you could see these interests in his drawings – how the contour marks he made helped describe volume and mass and how you can sense the weight of the objects, and the effects of gravity pulling the objects towards the earth. I showed the children how Moore’s special “contour” lines convey the form of the object by drawing lines with a felt pen on a potato.
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Ana Luiza Paschoal
March 12, 2012 @ 1:23 am
Fabulous idea !
I’m thinking of adapting it to my ninth graders who are building up drawings about human figure. I think they’ll loose their fears of drawing “well” and “beautifully”, or at least, I’ll try to break the paradigms of these concepts. I’m an art teacher from a bilingual school located in São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
Congratulations to your site !
Sincerely
Ana Luiza Paschoal
SCeccarelli
May 9, 2012 @ 1:30 pm
Every time I come back to this post I find it inspiring – love the way you make the approach so accessible to children by using objects that they can relate to and even love. Brilliant and beautiful!
alice thomson
May 13, 2016 @ 10:57 am
do you think this would work with adults – the playmobile?
Paula Briggs, AccessArt
May 13, 2016 @ 11:34 am
I think they’d love it! Actually I have done it with families and the adults loved drawing the playmobil then – they liked and responded well to its sculptural “ness”
Emma B
May 22, 2023 @ 9:58 pm
Would teens 16/17 yrs like the playmobil… I know I would!!
Paula
May 23, 2023 @ 12:18 pm
of course!