Here is a great painting lesson for your high school art students.  This lesson reinforces drawing skills related to realism, with an emphasis on proportion and form.  Furthermore, it teaches students to paint using old master techniques involving an underpainting and color matching.  One of the hardest things for art students is the act of matching value to color.  For this project, students first create an underpainting using only black, white, and gray tones. This helps them to see the values.  Next, they use a color copy to match colors.  They must place their mixed colors directly on the color copy to examine the value and chroma.  Most students are surprised to see how far off they are with their values.

Learning to draw in two-point perspective is easy and fun! With just a little bit of practice, you can draw amazing houses, buildings, and cities in perspective.  2 point perspective can also help you to draw everyday objects as well.  Once you understand how orthogonal lines recede into the distance and where to put in your points on the horizon line, you will be able to draw so many amazing things. Let’s get started!

Learning to draw in three-point perspective is easy to learn and fun to do! Drawing in 3 point perspective will enable you to render buildings and forms as if you are seeing them either from an ants-eye view or a birds-eye view. With a few simple tricks, you can be drawing like a pro!

I recently completed this simple beginning painting project with my high school seniors.  For this project, I taught my students how to paint using the classical style, starting with an under painting, and then moving on to color.  I have chunked this lesson out and made it as simple as possible.  All my students were able to achieve surprisingly good results.  If you try this lesson, please let me know how you do. 

Drawing in five-point perspective is truly fun, and you can create amazing drawings with little effort.  There are only a few simple rules to learn, and you will be off and running.  To make things easier, it helps if you are familiar with basic one-point perspective, but not it is not completely necessary.  See the slideshow on one-point perspective drawing at the bottom of this article for help.

A discussion of each of the principles of design with lots of color slides and examples, as well as a review of the elements of art. This lesson is interactive and offers a free downloadable version. Perfect for art teachers!