Wednesday, January 28, 2009

How to Draw a Castle

This lesson has been quite rewarding for my fourth grade classes. Looking at a pictures of detailed castles, with bricks, battlements, turrets and doors can be overwhelming, especially if you are expected to draw one.
I found the perfect solution. Borrowing a tip from my How To Draw a Barn lesson, I cut small and long rectangular shapes from tag board. These provide the perfect template for the center section of the castle. After tracing the center, the kids used a long templates to trace the two towers. This method is quick, accurate and eliminates the measuring and stress associated with creating the perfect lines. I demonstrated various decorative techniques varying in skill level from easy to more difficult. Many kids chose the difficult elements and felt quite proud of their accomplishments.
The first step was to pencil in all of the pencil lines, then we outlined the castle in black marker. This is the stage when I showed the kids how to add bricks. they loved how the bricks 'aged' the castle.
Finally (and this is the step that really takes the longest) is to color in the castle and background using colored pencils. If you have high quality colored pencils, the projects will turn out well. The color pencils used in this lessons were not so great, so the saturation was slightly weaker than I had hoped. Still, a wonderful project that the kids are super proud of.





To make life easier for you, I have developed a down-loadable lesson plan that features this "Castle" lesson. The PDF includes the measurements for templates and full photo tutorials. The PDF also includes two other lessons using templates as tools. Click on the "Buy Now" button below to purchase or go back HERE to see more details.

"Architecture Made Easy" Lesson Plan Booklet $5


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you provide visuals/examples for the details? Love your blog!

Patty Palmer said...

Hi Char,
I passed out a few drawing aides
(B & W drawings of castles) but basically demonstrated everything on the white board. The kids especially loved the instruction on how to draw bricks(the layered approach).

Jessica said...

I love this lesson. The kids produced such beautiful results! I'm excited to search through your archives for more ideas, tips, and tricks. I'm going to link to you in my sidebar, if you don't mind.

cata said...

Check www.imaginidecolorat.blogspot.com

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