Animal Zentangle

There's room for originality, even when there's lots of boundaries. For example, this art assignment seems to limit subject matter to animals (but there are thousands of different kinds of animals), color (you are free to choose any color you like, you just need to stick to it), and requires the use of pattern (but there are an infinite number of patterns that can be created).

To warm up, each student started by dividing a sheet of paper into at least 8 organically shaped spaces, and then they filled each space with a different pattern. This gets the juices flowing on possibilities.

To create the animal drawing, these students picked an animal image from the internet, and transferred it to a piece of paper. They did this by either tracing it on a light box or coloring the back of the print out with pencil and then tracing the front of the print out so that the graphite would be deposited onto the paper under it. For those who were blind, I traced an image for them and outlined it with hot glue. Then they could draw their pattern within a tactile space.

It's not a ground breaking, soul searching kind of assignment, but it does help students see that pattern makes things a little more interesting, and they can incorporate that into future projects.