After watching a short video about famous painter David Hockney, we decided to put our drawing skills to the test.  In the video, David Hockney demonstrates his style of drawing a chair.  What might seem peculiar to the viewer is that Mr Hockney doesn’t stay still while drawing.  He actually changes positions several times while drawing the chair on the same paper.  He calls this “drawing a walk around the chair.”

Click here for an example of David Hockey’s work.

For our project, we chose a chair to draw as a still life.  Students were placed around the chair (in this case we placed the chair on top of a table and students gathered their papers and chairs around).  Next, I set a timer using online stop-watch.com for 1 minute.  Students were to draw the chair using their contour drawing skills (see 6th grade Contour Shoes project) for exactly 1 minute.  When the timer goes off, each student picks a different seat and the process is repeated.  After at least 5 rotations, students were beginning to see their own “walk around a chair” come to life!

Once the rotations were complete, students returned to their regular seats.  We used sharpie markers to outline our drawing and colorful chalk to color our wacky chairs.  Some students were even brave enough to include the floor tiles!!  The results were fantastic!

Click here for a copy of the scoring guide:  David Hockney Chairs – 7th Grade