THIRD GRADE . . . Degas' Dancing Figures

Third graders followed up their lesson on figure drawing by creating another figure posed in motion, such as a dancer. For this project, we learned about Edgar Degas (1834-1917), a famous artist from France best known for his studies of ballerinas. Here are a few examples of his work. He was fascinated by the movement of the body and spent many hours studying the graceful poses in a dance studio.

Artwork by Gina

Students began their dancing figures with a step by step lesson on drawing a figure in motion. In this partial drawing, Gina drew the head, neck and body of her dancer and then added legs and feet, posed in a position that a dancer would stand in. The next step would be to add the arms and hands showing a graceful movement. Unlike our wooden artist model figures, these dancers are wearing clothing so we had to make sense out of how the arms and legs would look under a skirt or pants.

Artwork by Chantal

Artwork by Kris

These students completed their poses and added a simple indication of a face. Working first with the background, we painted a tone of color to the paper with a watercolor wash. Once these background colors dry we will be able to complete our projects by highlighting and adding color to our dancing figures.