I have never considered myself an artist; I mean, I can draw a few simple objects to get a point across, but certainly not something as detailed as a face. My assignment this week for Learning & Cognition class was to search the internet for a picture of a stranger, study it for one minute, hide the picture but create an image of it in my head, then sketch it and reflect upon the activity. I asked my husband to find a picture for me, and here’s what he found.
When I studied it, I focused on features such as the shortly cut hair, dark brown eyes, the unsymmetrical nose and lips, and the white t-shirt. Once I turned the screen off, I was able to hold the picture in my mind fairly easily, but when I started sketching it out, my poor skills totally morphed what I saw in my head, and then the imagery in my head decayed. I remembered how he seemed to be sitting forward, and I simply cannot portray that in a picture. What I drew first was the hair and eyes because those stuck out to me the most. I cannot draw noses or lips correctly, but I attempted the crookedness of them. The ears are totally out of proportion, and I forgot the goatie altogether.
It was so easy to find a picture of a perfect stranger on the internet; ask me to do this 20 years ago, and I would have reached for the newspaper or a magazine. Now I can search for almost anything and find a plethora of visuals to stimulate my students’ brains. I use a lot of visuals in my teaching – there are just some things that are shown better in pictures and videos than just explained, such as phototropism in plants or how waves weather and erode cliffs – I am so glad to have technology to “see the world.”
