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Blackboard Sketching

Chapter 12: PLATE 9
By Frederick Whitney
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About This Book

The manual offers step-by-step instruction for making effective blackboard sketches using chalk and charcoal, beginning with basic strokes and progressing to complete classroom illustrations. Plates show stroke techniques and examples — simple shapes, objects, landscapes, seasonal and subject-based drawings — with explicit directions for pressure, angle, and chalk handling. Lessons explain how to adapt sketches for reading, arithmetic, geography, history, nature study, calendars, and holidays, and encourage teachers to practice strokes, vary touches, and adapt examples rather than copy them. Emphasis is placed on using sketching as a visual teaching aid to hold attention, clarify lessons, and lead children to use drawing as spontaneous expression.

Plate 9

PLATE 9

Lesson No. 7 gave a few suggestions useful in geography and landscape work. This time we will try another type which will doubtless be found equally useful.

Stroke 1 is a horizontal stroke accented at the lower end of the chalk by a decided pressure. This will readily give a tone for the sky and a definite line for the horizon.

At No. 2, the sky is drawn in the same manner, and charcoal or black chalk is introduced for the ocean. These touches are made with the side of the chalk in irregular, wavy lines.

Spray may be represented by massing a little chalk near the rocks or beach, and by rubbing the tip of the finger or a soft bit of cloth into the body of chalk, gradually blending it into the rocks or water. See No. 4.

To obtain a sketch like that given in this lesson, first draw the horizon, then the wavy strokes for the sea. The cliffs or rocks are drawn by using strokes like those at No. 3. They are irregular strokes accented with one end of the chalk. Here again the charcoal is useful in adding crevices or shadows in the rocks. Erase spots for the boats and add details.

The effect of a beach may be produced by using the same broad stroke as in the sky, accenting with the upper end of the chalk to give the margin of the beach. Add a few ripples and pebbles, or a bit of seaweed, using the point of the chalk.

The sketch given on this plate was used as an illustration for literature.

A heap of bare and splintery crags
Tumbled about by lightning and frost.

      —Lowell.