Last week I started to teach my Art 1 class perspective.  We started with atmospheric perspective, went to linear one-point perspective yesterday, and will continue on to two-point perspective within the next few days.  A whole unit on perspective!  It is definitely interesting to teach perspective to students for the first time.  I taught it to my third graders in my last placement when we discussed Seurat’s landscapes.  It can be a mundane topic, but I love trying to make it as interesting as possible!

Here are some of our atmospheric perspective drawings:

Teaching third graders perspective was definitely more difficult than I anticipated, and I’m hoping that I am able to relay the information to my high school students in a way that they can fully understand it, and find it interesting.  Yesterday we discussed the history of perspective and how Brunelleschi used a mirror to ensure that his drawings were mathematically correct, who takes the time to do that today! We have computers and cameras to help us with that now right?!  My students all thought that was super fun and strange, but it intrigued them!

The video can be found here.

After discussing the necessary vocabulary to understand one point perspective, we started to draw boxes in perspective and the students had great success with it.  Hopefully, that transfers into drawing rooms in one point perspective with Van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles” as inspiration.