Form follow function.

Form follow function. One of my advanced drawing classes comprised more boys than girls,so I attempted to gear subject matter toward seemingly more maleinterests. We had just completed a Prismacolor[R] rendering of a stilllife of character masks--something the guys really enjoyed--so I decidedto depart from my usual focus of figures, portraiture, abstraction andthe like. APPLIANCE ART While at a furniture store noted for its Scandinaviandesign For the furniture store chain Scandinavian Design, see .Scandinavian Design emerged in the 1950s in the three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) as well as Finland as a design movement characterised by simple, uncomplicated designs, minimalism, stylisation, , I had seen poster art of appliances that I fell in love withand, though part of the drawings were somewhat rendered, the rest wascomposed of ink sketches of either a different point of view or a partof the whole. I was intrigued. They were just posters, yet terribly expensive, so I couldn'tpurchase them to show the kids. So, attempting to remember what I hadseen, I visited local libraries and the school library in hopes offinding other drawings that would help guide my students and me. The search was for what I was calling "schematicdrawings." I looked under industrial design, appliance design,commercial design, schematics, isometric isometric/iso��met��ric/ (-met��rik) maintaining, or pertaining to, the same measure of length; of equal dimensions. i��so��met��ricadj.1. drafting, all to no avail. Isought out a colleague in our school's Industry and Technologydepartment and we searched through his old college books ... nothingeven remotely like the lovely, drawn "plans" and designs of aMixmaster' or a tea kettle. Explaining what I had seen to my students, I asked them to bring insmall appliances. To get them started I personally brought in an olderblender, iron, DustBuster[R], oil can, Polaroid camera Noun 1. Polaroid camera - a camera that develops and produces a positive print within secondsPolaroid Land cameracamera, photographic camera - equipment for taking photographs (usually consisting of a lightproof box with a lens at one end and , and an old1950s-style bar blender, complete with chrome container. A few studentsbrought in their own objects: one, a 1930s radio; another, a coffee pot A coffee pot is a kitchen implement; a cooking pot in the kettle family. A coffee pot is also a container to hold freshly brewed coffee. There are many types and styles. ;and, another, a flashlight. INDUSTRIAL BEAUTY They had to create a lot of sketches on newsprintbecause it was imperative they consider the functional beauty of theobject and discover its "design" qualities. Like a designercarving a car's body shape out of plasticine clay, giving dimensionto the drawing of what the car's lines might look like in space. After their preliminary sketches were done, I critiqued them forcorrect foreshortening foreshortening,n See distortion, vertical. and proportion. We then cut them out from theirnewsprint sheet and played around with placement, being careful not tocenter anything, and not have a part of the object point out of thepicture plane. The posters I had seen were warm in tone around the periphery ofthe paper, almost Da-Vinci-esque, like Leonardo's sepia-inksketches from his marvelous sketchbooks. The object's partsappeared to be done in ink, off to the sides; the whole object wascenter-stage, rendered in black and white with hints of earth tones. Initially, we were going to use hot-press illustration board, but Ididn't think the thickness of illustration board would give ourdrawings the strong, industrial appearance we were after. Instead, Ichose heavy watercolor board I had ordered for my watercolorists andhadn't used. It's wonderful stuff, great texture and takes abeating. But, there is a drawback: You must either cut it by hand (whichtakes forever with a box cutter) or with a huge cutter found in theIndustrial department of a school or workplace. It's that thick! FINAL RENDERINGS Once their compositions were created, studentsused graphite transfer paper under their sketches to transfer theelementsof their compositions onto the heavy board. When riley achieved afaint graphite-transfer drawing of the parts and the whole object, theywent in with ink and delineated the parts and the main subjects. Finally, they shaded and rendered the whole object, giving it asense of three-dimensionality and form. Students chose pastel colors to"powder up" with sandpaper sandpaper,abrasive originally made by gluing grains of sand to heavy paper sheets. Today sandpaper is made primarily with quartz, aluminum oxide, or silicon carbide grains, and is graded according to the size of the grains. and apply with cloth or facialtissue, setting the mood of their drawings. They either erased out someof the pastel coloring to suggest chrome and other highlights, orsparingly used hints of soft white pastel. These drawings are great. I love them as much as the posters I sawat the store and I know the kids loved doing them. They took theirsubject apart, studied it, drew it and felt a sense that, maybe, theyhad really designed and created the object themselves. We took ordinary, functional objects and made them into works ofart, and students got an idea of what it might be like to create anddesign something using their artistic skills in a nontraditional way.Form really does follow function. LEARNING OBJECTIVES Students will ... * use various mediums. * compose a composition. * break down an object into parts. * render a utilitarian object. * show different points of view of an object. * find beauty in the ordinary. MATERIALS * Newsprint * Drawing pencils * Illustration or watercolor board * Box cutter or large paper cutter * Staedtler[R] Mars plastic or Kneadable Knead´a`blea. 1. That may be kneaded; capable of being worked into a mass. erasers * Graphite transfer paper * Tissue soft rag, chamois chamois(shăm`ē), hollow-horned, hoofed mammal, Rupicapra rupicapra, found in the mountains of Europe and the E Mediterranean. * Chalk pastels * Sandpaper * Ink pens (permanent ink) * Black charcoal pencil if desired Now retired from teaching, Arts & Activities ContributingEditor Geri Greenman was head of the art department at Willowbrook HighSchool Willowbrook High School, or WBHS, is a public four-year high school located approximately half a mile North of Illinois Route 38 on Ardmore Ave in Villa Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. in Villa Park, Ill., when she wrote this article.