playing with light and shadow

When I told the kids we were making shadow puppets, light tunnels, and shadow drawings, they went "yipee!" 3d, modeling, cut and paste, and a bit of painting ... but we made these things to explore light and shadow.  We were seeing shapes in the rawest form of 3 dimensions.

So WHY?  Before you can draw, you need to understand light and shadows, you need to be able to visually identify the:

• Light source: The direction from which the light originates. The placement of this light source affects every aspect of an object.  We saw this in our tunnel, as we moved the tunnel away from the direct light, the shadows cast differently across the objects we placed inside the tunnel.

• Shadows: The areas on an object that receive little or no light.  As in shadow puppetry where the light source is behind our object, the object itself is black.  Drawing from shadows was also an interesting way to discover how the areas that received no light appeared as a solid shadow on our paper, and the edges a shade.  We discovered that the lamp also created an outer glow before it tapered away to normal light.

• Cast shadow: The dark area on an adjacent surface where the light is blocked by the solid object.  At the back of our tunnel we all placed a piece of cellophane, and most of us drew on it.  The drawings cast shadows through the tunnel because they blocked the light, as did the objects that we placed inside the tunnel.  With our puppets, some of us experimented with cellophane in our objects.  The light shining through the transparent cellophane cast a different shadow to the opaque piece of cardboard.

Now that you are all clued up on light and shadow...have a look at what the kids did Friday.  Absolutely amazing!