Near and Far Perspective Crowds

I have had kids tell me that when something is far away, it is not smaller.
Literally, they are right, but visually, they are wrong when it comes to showing perspective in a setting.
Realism in Art( I feel like perspective is a part of that) is frustrating for my third grade students, so I decided to show them the elements of perspective without getting hung up on creating a realistic piece of work. (like the playground scene my curriculum suggests)
I took a page from Pam's Modigliani lesson last month and changed the people in our crowd portraits into people-ish.
People-ish people resemble people, but not in a perfectly real way.

Example Below 

Because I am a bitmoji loving 50- something, we made our crowd out of cartoon characters.
The objectives were still to teach near and far perspective, overlapping, and how people look smaller visually when they are far away.
A fifth grade student who is exceptionally talented at Minecraft and Pokeman character drawing, came in and gave us a lesson on creating made-up creatures(this was a good shift for him as well). I love it when students teach students. He was prepared. He even made us ALL call him Mr. Jones(Jones substituted for his real name).

The third grade then played a partner game of "Roll a Character". The dice thingy with cartoon faces.
They went bananas. They were so excited about their created characters.
Next, they quickly sketched out (lightly) their crowds of characters. The only rule to this game was to overlap, make each row of heads smaller, and to create a new face for each character.
To keep it graphic and awesome, we just added black sharpie. I added a quick impromptu lesson about every dark/light area helping draw our eye around the composition.
Crowd Cartoons-the bomb.com


working large and adding a background



so many interesting faces!



So creative!



adding dark and leaving light areas



Texture too!