This is the drawing exploration that we did in the BEd Elementary Art course. We played around a bit with different pencil hardness, as well as shading, cross-hatching, and stippling techniques. A fun project for that could be done to practice these techniques could be to create a comic strip or single panel comic of a scene in the classroom. This way, students have real objects that they can look at to copy for their line drawings, as well as real shadows to mimic with their cross-hatching or stippling techniques. The images that look like aliens here are blind-contour drawings of people in my art class. The rules for blind contour drawings are simple: 1. Don’t lift your pencil off the page, and 2. Don’t look at your page. This type of drawing forces you to focus entirely on the subject of the drawing, rather than the drawing itself. It is a good way to begin training the eye. However, it does often produce ridiculous drawings like those pictured in this post. A safe space in the classroom is a must before doing this activity, as some students might be offended by the horrifying line-messes that are supposedly them. One way to get around this could be drawing objects rather than people. Moving on from this activity, contour line drawings where the artist is allowed to look at the page are a great activity for focusing on the subject and the lines in the drawing. Choosing which parts of an object to represent with lines and what to exclude is good practice.