Give 3rd grade a hand!

Third grade artists learned about contour lines. A contour line drawing is a drawing based on direct observation. The idea is that your eye looks very closely at what you are drawing. Your eye and your hand become 'synced', and your hand draws exactly what your eye sees. So your eye is crawling very slowly over the contours (edges) of your hand. As your eyes slowly observes these details, your hand draws them. After some practice drawings we looked at the American Sign Language alphabet. We picked one word to spell. Most of us chose our names. We posed our hand in the chosen letter and drew each hand through direct observation. This was not an easy project, but we found that if we let our eyes do the observing, most anything is fairly simple to draw.