Let's play chess.

My composition and design class is full of students who have been in my class for two or three years. By the end of each year, all of my creative lessons are exhausted. At the start of the next year, I spend most of my time searching for new resources to stimulate creative projects that are fun and inspiring. In this case, I needed a project that would give my students the opportunity to apply their understanding of perspective, size change, overlapping, and foreground, middle ground, and background, while they created a three-dimensional composition.

When searching for ideas, it's amazing how many you can come up with simply by reflecting on your own past experiences. I remembered a game that my grandfather taught me when I was young, chess. I could introduce something old and not particularly popular today, as something new and potentially interesting.

At the start of this unit on one-point perspective and drawing a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane, I displayed several historical works of art that exhibited these elements. Later, I demonstrated one-point perspective on the board while students followed along on their own paper. Students practiced one-point perspective by creating a simple design that would allow them to draw shapes and forms in various sizes and at different eye levels.

Phew! Now let's see what they learned. A chessboard has all the elements of one-point perspective, including size change, overlapping, and foreground, middle ground, and background. As a motivational technique, I brought in a chess set from home for the students to examine. I wasn't at all surprised to know that many of the students had never seen a chess set before, not to mention their limited knowledge of how to play the game. I allowed the students to study the pieces and taught them the fundamentals of the game. They were extremely attentive and excited to discover what was to come.

After spending half the period on how to play the game, it was time to create a drawing of one. Not only did students have to draw a chessboard in proper one-point perspective, they also had to design their own pieces to the game. Their game could be in play or set up to begin playing. They had to include size change, overlapping, foreground, middle ground, background, and an environment that would best enhance their composition. Students chose designs from comic books, magazines, and their imaginations. Their ideas were endless. To complete their drawings, they used black marker to trace their lines and colored pencils to color in their composition.

In the end, students demonstrated full knowledge of one-point perspective, size change, overlapping, and foreground, middle ground, and background. Their compositions were creative and interesting. As a bonus for their hard work and effort, I offered to stay after school for one day to teach anyone who wanted to learn how to play chess. We hope you enjoy our creations as much as we enjoyed creating them.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students employ organizational structures and analyze what makes them effective or not effective in the communication of ideas.

Anissa Mendez is an art teacher at K.O. Knudson Middle School in Las Vegas, Nevada.