Kelli Crockett Art

One lesson I teach focuses on observational art skills, specifically drawing from life without a reference image. This lesson and exercise teaches the student how to interpret an object in space, accurately translate proportions into the picture plane, distinguish subtle variations in color, and more. The slideshow includes examples of student work: two images of the same banana made by students observing different angles, white eggs on a white sheet of paper challenge, and other objects from observation with no digital references.

Creating master copies is a great way to teach a student how to surpass existing drawing skills and step into the world of research and analysis. A student will make a diagram of the elements and principals in an existing artwork that was successful, then create a copy of that artwork in the same or a different media. Afterwards, they conduct an analysis of the experiment, focusing on what they observed about the elements/principles during the process, why it matters, and how it can be used in their own work. This is a lesson plan I came up with as an honors project in college, click here to see my assignment example that I conducted for that project.

This is an example of how I approach teaching new media to a student. This was a digital media student who wanted to learn how to create watercolor-like illustrations in Photoshop. The full diagram shows the 12 step process I taught her to go from her sketch to a completed artwork, which we followed in class together both in watercolor and Photoshop to compare the similarities of the media.

These are a few examples of student notes taken during demos or as homework to demonstrate understanding of a lesson. Sketchbooks are important tools for artists, not only to keep visual ideas, but to conduct investigations, analysis, studies, and research to better their artistic knowledge. These are digital notes, though I have students who keep notes both digitally and in physical sketchbooks. No matter the media of note taking, I make sure to teach organization, routine, and how to upkeep sketchbook practices as we move through new topics and projects.

These are some of the various diagrams I’ve used to teach students different techniques in lessons. Although I do like to be resourceful in using diagrams made by other teachers, I generally prefer making my own and recreating them with the students as I walk them through taking thorough notes. While some diagrams work well as “handouts,” (and thus, can be more polished and refined) I find having the student draw the diagram themselves and label everything makes them retain the information better and they are more likely to hold onto the diagram for later use.

When teaching the basics of Photoshop and Procreate, I like to give some fun and silly exercises to break up what can often be tedious and monotonous to a new student. These are some funny examples of a student learning layers and editing tools in Procreate prior to learning the drawing/painting tools, in which she was asked to composite multiple images to look as if they are one picture. She understood the assignment perfectly and decided to make it look like her last family vacation was a lot more exciting than it was (haha).