Experiment Lab: Mark Shift Balance
I WANT TO PAY IN
Add to WishlistDescription
The Experiment Lab: Mark Shift Balance
Duration: Designed to be one fast-paced workshop-style lesson. However, you know your class, their abilities and needs!
Objective: Students will investigate mark-making inspired by natural textures and explore how removing, repositioning, and rotating part of an artwork can transform and rebalance a composition.
The Experiment Lab is a series of workshop-style art lessons designed to encourage creativity, curiosity, and experimentation with materials and processes. Rather than working towards a single final outcome, students explore a range of techniques, media, and approaches through practical investigations and creative challenges. Each workshop provides a clear starting point, a selection of materials to experiment with, and visual examples to inspire ideas, while leaving plenty of room for personal interpretation and discovery.
These lessons are ideal for developing confidence, encouraging creative risk-taking, enriching sketchbook work, and helping students understand that experimentation is an important part of the artistic process. There is no single correct outcome; the emphasis is on exploration, discovery, and developing ideas through making.
In Mark, Shift, Balance, students use natural textures as inspiration, rather than something to copy directly. They create a square drawing that explores line, pattern, texture and mark-making. Students are encouraged to combine, enlarge, simplify and transform elements from their chosen images to create an original composition.
Experiment Twist
Partway through the workshop, students are introduced to the Experiment Twist. In this workshop, students select and remove a circle of their drawing and reposition it, breaking the border of their drawing. Designed to maintain engagement and encourage creative thinking, it prompts students to develop their existing experiments rather than start again, reflecting how artists often respond to new ideas and challenges during the creative process.
Included in this download:
- A PowerPoint presentation containing a written brief, simplified keywords to support learners of different abilities, visual examples to inspire experimentation, and the Experiment Twist.
- The same presentation available as a Google Slides view-only link for quick, browser-based use.
- A selection of bark and cracked earth reference images that can be printed and placed on desks to inspire students.
- The visual examples as PDFs that can be printed and placed on desks to inspire students.
- A lesson plan that helps structure the workshop.
Square drawing paper, pencils, fineliners or other drawing media, circular templates or stencils, scissors or craft knives as appropriate, and glue sticks. Optional: Black paper for display.
You must log in and be a buyer of this download to submit a review.
