Art Masterpiece Project Procedure Form€¦ · blobs, it doesn't last long though before the reservoir is emptied. They will lose interest before too long. Never add anything other

Property Of: ANNA MARIE JACOBSON ELEMENTARY

ART MASTERPIECE PROGRAM

Art Masterpiece

Project Procedure Form Artist: Albrecht Durer

Name of Print: “The Rhinoceros”

Project: Create a Fantasy Animal Using Pen and Ink

Objective: Introduction To Pen and Ink Technique and Creating an Animal using Patterned Texture

Description: Albrecht Durer is famous for his wonderful self portraits in oil, but also for his

detailed and masterly executed drawings and etchings. He used lines to show texture and to make things look 3-dimensional. Talk about patterns used in the print to show texture and shading. Explain that by putting lines closer together the area is shaded and creates a 3-D effect. Using the templates provided, have the students trace an animal with an HB pencil. Demonstrate how to use the pen and ink. Never dip the pen too deep into the ink. Try some lines on a separate piece of paper. Pens should not make screeching noises; it should let the ink flow lightly. Put ink well on paper towel, to soak up drips. Have Clorox wipes handy to clean fingers of ink. Now the students are ready to fill in their animal with pen and ink. Encourage them to use unusual shapes to create textures such as little circles, little bows, cross hatches, swirls, scales, etc… Have student’s sign their art work with their initials like Albrecht Durer did. You may need to demonstrate on the board with a few of the students so they get the idea.

Suggestions: The students really like this project because it takes away the step of creating a

whole animal and lets them concentrate on line and texture. Don’t worry too much if they do not finish the entire animal. The project still looks great unfinished.



Supplies: Parchment Paper (8 ½ x11) HB Pencils Nibs and Pen Indian Ink Templates of Animal Outlines ***IMPORTANT*** Please see diagram on how to properly use the nibs. It is really important to properly instruct students on how to use the pens. They tend to break when not used properly. Please DON NOT soak in water or alcohol. Swirl in alcohol and IMMEDIATELY dry with paper towel! The nibs rust easily and other classes need them in good working order.

Safety and Sanity

When using ink, we have several safety measures we go through and / or keep handy.

The first is that the lid stays on the bottle for younger students nearby. You never know when there will be a bump to the table/desk and the ink will fall over.

The bottle ALWAYS stays in the MIDDLE of the table, not near any one child or near the edge. When someone needs to dip the pen, the pen is brought to the ink bottle, not vice-versa.

Use either papertowels or toilet paper, several layers without making it too thick, to place the ink bottle on. If a drip happens or a splash, the ink is soaked up immediately and the bottle lifted, the table/desk wiped up, and no stains left. If you don't have a table that repels stains, you may want to put a ziplock baggie or plastic wrap under the papertowels. A plastic or vinyl placemat will also work.

We use a tissue or *ball* of toilet paper placed near each child for them to rest the pen on if needed. This way there is less likelihood that it will roll off the table/desk or that a drip will happen while the pen is resting and will go un-noticed. If the children need to wash their nibs, the toilet paper is handy to dry the nibs on too. (We have found that toilet paper works better than papertowels. It doesn't have the tendency to want to lay flat all the time, soaks up spills faster than papertowels, and can be bunched into balls that the pens can rest on. Tissues would be a second choice. See what works best for you and have it handy.)

Only one bottle of ink is allowed to be open at any time on the table (you can often have several bottles out, but only one open at any given time). If there is more than one bottle open, student's elbows seem to have an uncanny way of finding their neighbors ink and knocking it over.

Only OLD clothes are to be worn while using ink! Is this self- explanatory enough? Although you may



never completely ruin any clothing, you can end up with *freckles* on many things.

If you have a student that always seems to end up with ink on their fingers (and there is always ONE like this), I have found that using an oil-based lotion or mineral oil rubbed on their hands BEFORE using the ink helps keep the stained hands to a minimum. But once you have the lotion or oil on the skin, wipe off enough to keep the pen from slipping too much. You want his skin coated but not *layered* with the oily coating. If the child does have problems holding the pen, either a cloth tape (found in the first aid section of most stores) or cloth Band-Aids can be applied to the areas he holds on the pen. This helps ALOT.

Also with the cloth tape in mind, if you have a child with small hands and fingers, one who may have a handicap with their hands, or a child who needs more kinesthetic (touch) in their learning and practicing...the cloth tape wrapped around the whole length of the pen will help them a great deal.

If your student has a cut or scrape on their fingers or hands, you may want to have them wait until it's healed before letting them use the dipping pens. In a fresh cut, the black indelible ink especially, can work like a tattoo ink and permanently stain the skin. If the student will still be using the ink, you may want to put a heavy layer of petroleum jelly or Neosporin over the cut or scrape.

Keep an eye on the students when they dip the pens, even the older ones forget or don't pay attention and dip too deeply (sometimes it's hard to see inside the bottle and they dip too far not knowing where the ink is, but if you look at an angle, you can see the top layer of ink and watch as the nib goes into it). 1/4 inch is usually enough to fill the reservoir without overfilling and causing the ink to go up inside the actual pen. This is messy when it happens! You will need to take the pen to the sink and pull out the nib, rinse the nib and then try your best to rinse the ink out of the pen. I often end up having to push in -pull out, push in-out with the nib until it starts to come out clean without the inky residue. Also, if you take the nib out and reach inside your trash can with the pen, banging gently against the side, the ink will often start to shake itself out. One last tip would be to layer up the papertowels or toilet paper and bang the end of the pen directly onto the pile of papertowels. This works, but can be messy too.

Teach your students, younger ones especially, NOT to hold onto the nib while writing! Kids seem to naturally want to hold close to the tip of whatever writing instrument they are using. Although pencils and ball-point pens don't leave stains, this causes cramped hands and fingers and it shows in their writing. With dipping pens, the students will have very stained fingers as well as bending the nibs out of alignment. The proper way to hold the pen and nib is to have the thumb and first finger gently holding or pinching the pen at the hub while the pen rests on the second finger. You don't want the student to use his fingers to *move* the pen across the paper, but to learn to move his whole arm across the paper and only use the fingers for accenting curves. In other words...the whole arm should move the pen and NOT just the fingers.

ALL ink has the potential to stain...so use caution and if you have a very bouncy or active student you may want to sit next to them and *guard* the ink bottle and dip the pen for them. Also, children should



never shake or point the pen at others...and they DO like to do this once in a while, especially boys!

Never allow a student to hold the ink filled nib against the paper to watch a large spot form! Not only will it seep through to the tabletop, but it weakens the paper and tears it easily, and the student usually ends up smearing that large spot all over his hands while he is working. The nib needs to be touching the paper while you are writing and moving it, when not writing it needs to be lifted up or the contact between nib and paper will continually draw the ink down to the paper. (Another reason why the ball-point pen became popular!) If you have a student who is just fascinated with the growing ink blobs, let him do this on toilet paper a few times. It is rather fascinating to watch as the ink flows and makes big blobs, it doesn't last long though before the reservoir is emptied. They will lose interest before too long.

Never add anything other than water to ink to thin it out, unless the bottle directions say differently.

Wash ALL nibs after use (do not dip the pen in, only the nib!), then dry with papertowels or toilet paper. The nibs are not stainless steel and they will rust!!! They will also stain too. So don't be surprised if you end up with colored nibs. Some inks have a shellac in them, and this is very similar to the acrylic inks in staining nibs.

Use your common sense and err on the side of caution.



If the pen is sitting properly in your hand, it's close enough to the correct alignment for the pen

The ball-point pen, needs to be pushed against the paper so that the ball will turn



Albrecht Dürer (Al-brekt Du-rur (as in bur)

Dürer was born on May 21, 1471, in Nuremberg, Germany. His father was

a goldsmith and his mother was the daughter of a goldsmith. He was from a

family of 18 children; he was the third childe and the second son and was

named for his father. His father probably taught him the basics of drawing and

also instilled in him a devotion to exact detail which is the mark of a goldsmith’s

work.

Dürer was apprenticed at the age of 15 to the leading painter and book

illustrator, Michael Wolgemut in his native Nuremberg. He learned the painter’s

trade and the craft of woodcutting.

Upon the completion of his apprenticeship Dürer set out to many cities and

foreign countries to study and talk to different artists. He was concerned with

the Renaissance problems of ideal beauty, perspective, proportions and

harmony.

Dürer returned to Nuremberg at the age of 23 in 1494 and married Agnes

Frey, a marriage that had been arranged in his absence while he was away.

Agnes was the daughter of a prominent brass worker. No children resulted from

the marriage.



Within three months of marrying, he left for Italy and traveled throughout

Europe, including the Alps. As he traveled he was one of the first artists to

record his travels in paintings. Most of these were watercolor sketches and they

were a personal record more than anything else of the many places he had

traveled. These are the first pure landscape studies known in Western Art.

When he returned from his travels in 1495 he quickly set up shop and

opened his own workshop (being married was a requirement in order to open a

business). He quickly became a well established artist. His style integrated

Italian influences into his Northern Form. His best works in the first years of the

workshop were his woodcut prints, mostly religious. Dürer’s woodcuts were

larger than the great majority of German woodcuts hitherto and far more

complex and balanced in composition. During the same period Dürer trained

himself in the difficult art of using the burin to make engravings. It is possible he

had begun learning this skill during his early training with his father, as it was

also an essential skill of the goldsmith. Prints are highly portable and these

works made Dürer famous throughout the main artistic centres of Europe within

a very few years.

The Emperor Maximilian was on of his most important patrons. There is a

story told of an experience Dürer had with Maximilian. Maximilian asked Dürer

to paint something on a rather large wall. Dürer was too short to reach as high

as he needed so the Emperor asked one of the members of his court to come



forward and let Dürer stand on his back. The nobleman protested and the

Emperor said, “I can make a nobleman out of a peasant, but it is not in my

power to make an artist out of a nobleman.”

Dürer has been called the “Leonardo of the North”. He had a love of life

and a thirst for knowledge. He kept a day to day diary, with drawings of the

people he had seen and the place he had been. During his travels he took a

large stock of prints with him and wrote in his diary to whom he gave,

exchanged or sold them, and for how much. This provides rare information of

the monetary value placed on prints at this time. Unlike paintings, their sale was

very rarely documented.

Dürer became famous for his oil painting, watercolors, drawings, copper

engravings and woodcuts. Woodcuts are made by cutting away the wood

except for the lines upon which ink is to be rolled to make the image appear on

the paper. It was simple, inexpensive and popular. It became an art form that

was affordable to more people than oil painting. A master of the woodcut, Dürer

took pride in adding extra lines, twists and curls. Because the Gutenberg press

had been invented Dürer was able to do his woodcuttings. Because of his prints

he became an artist for the people, he also became rich. He was always

concerned about the study of the ideal human form and the expression of some

very deeply felt religious ideas. Dürer began his own studies, which would

become a lifelong preoccupation. A series of extant drawings show Dürer's



experiments in human proportion, leading to the famous engraving of Adam and

Eve (1504). The engraving of Adam and Eve is the only existing engraving

signed with his full name. In 1515, he created his woodcut of the Rhinoceros

from a written description and sketch by another artist, without ever seeing the

animal himself. Despite being relatively inaccurate (the animal belonged to a

now-extinct Indian species), the image has such force that it remains one of his

best-known and was still used in some German school science text-books.

Dürer created his three most famous engravings: The Knight, Death, and

the Devil (1513), St. Jerome in his Study (1514), and the much-debated

Melencolia I (1514). His most celebrated paintings are: Adam and Eve (1507),

The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (1508), Virgin with the Iris (1508), the

altarpiece Assumption of the Virgin (1509), and Adoration of the Trinity (1511).

His most famous preparatory drawing for his engravings and paintings is

Praying Hands (1508). Dürer succeeded in producing two books during his

lifetime. "The Four Books on Measurement" were published at Nuremberg in

1525 and was the first book for adults on mathematics in German. The other, a

work on city fortifications, was published in 1527. "The Four Books on Human

Proportion" were published posthumously, shortly after his death in 1528 at the

age of fifty-six.



During his last trip to the Netherlands in July 1521, he caught an

undetermined illness—perhaps malaria —which afflicted him for the rest of his

life, and greatly reduced his rate of work. Dürer died in Nuremberg at the age of

56 in 1528, leaving an estate valued at 6,874 florins—a considerable sum. His

large house, where his workshop was located and where his widow lived until

her death in 1537, remains a prominent Nuremberg landmark. It is now a

museum.

Documents

Art Masterpiece Project Procedure Form€¦ · blobs, it doesn't last long though before the reservoir is emptied. They will lose interest before too long. Never add anything other