Surreal Rooms

Grade Level

Duration

10 periods, 45-minute periods

Materials

Color pencil, eraser, drawing paper, camera, student-selected objects, lights, “room” created by foam core board for photo setup.

Media

Color pencils

Lesson Objectives

The student will…
• define Surrealism and identify key characteristics in Magritte’s work, such as the juxtaposition of ordinary objects in extraordinary ways and dreamlike qualities.
• understand Surrealism and Magritte’s use of scale and perspective.
• understand one-point perspective and be able to apply one-point perspective to create a room.
• create works of art in the style of René Magritte.
• demonstrate good craftsmanship in perspective drawing and color pencil rendering of their personal surreal rooms.
• use appropriate vocabulary to discuss, critique, and analyze both their own work and Magritte’s.

Introductory Activity

Students learned how to draw a one-point perspective room for this lesson. In the previous class, students had already been taught shading and had developed skills and knowledge of value and color theory (this teacher’s prior lesson can be found on TPT).

Students looked at the artwork Personal Values, created in 1952 by René Magritte. Students discussed the painting’s surrealist elements, such as the oversized everyday objects and the sky on the walls, and analyzed how these create a sense of disorientation. Magritte uses surreal imagery to make viewers question their relationship to everyday objects.

Students then brought in objects that hold “personal value” to them, determined the lighting for their reference photos, and photographed them. The teacher built a box to resemble the room and used a light stand to direct the light where students posed the objects they brought in and took the reference photos.

Lesson Process

Using the one-point perspective they were taught, students next designed their own room. They then used the reference photos to render the rooms with the selected objects using color pencils.