By drawing or painting to music, students will learn to identify the similarities between music and art.
By Geoff Thompson [Geoff is a teacher from Whitby, Ontario, Canada.]
What You Need:
- Paper
- Various music accompaniments (i.e. classical, pop, country, rock)
- Pencils
- Pencil crayons
What You Do:
This is an excellent abstract shape, and color balancing exercise.
- Students place the tip of their pencil in the middle of the paper and close their eyes.
- With their eyes closed, the teacher begins playing a song on the CD player.
- Students then begin moving their pencils in movements on the page that mimic the instruments or rhythms of the music pieces. (i.e. a drum solo might be penciled as a jagged heart rate monitor-like line)
- The teacher alters the music from style to style while the students keep their eyes shut.
- Eventually (when most of the page is covered in lines) the students are told to open their eyes and to trace (darkly) all the penciled lines with a black pencil crayon.
- Finally, students are instructed to color each individual shape (that has been created by the penciled lines) in such a way that none of the same colors are touching each other.
NOTE: Usually students enjoy this activity VERY much. They enjoy trying the music-eyes-closed-thing a lot. I suggest doing this a couple of practice times before drawing the final piece.
