Stippling with 6th Grade

My 6th grade students recently learned about the art of stippling, after seeing several Wall Street Journal portraits. We even perused WSJ artist Kevin Sprouls' website on my Promethean board. Then, we reviewed hatching and cross-hatching that the students learned last year in 5th grade. We talked about how when you use an ink pen, you only have black, and no shades of gray from pressing lighter, like you do with a pencil. The options for making the illusion of shades of gray with a black ink pen are hatching, cross-hatching, and lastly, stippling! The students drew animals from black and white photographs, and copied the values using stippling. As you can see, some animals were more popular than others, even though I had over 20 choices available!