Litter, Litter, Everywhere

Painting beautiful scenes of nature and wildlife and then destroying the beauty by littering the landscape with multicolored shipping crates, Mary Iverson is a contemporary painter who has developed a very unique style of art making.  Her pieces are more like messages than they are paintings.  Her work shows massive cargo ships and shipping crates littering the Earth and destroying nature.

She wants to tell the world that mankind is ruining our planet, and that if we don't stop now, this is the environment that we will live in and ultimately leave behind.  This message comes through loud and clear in her paintings.

She uses perspective and vanishing points to place the objects into the space.  This technique allows the crates and ships to realistically appear to be a part of the landscape.  However, different from typical perspective drawing, she doesn't remove the lines and vanishing points, she does this to emphasize her notion that litter does not go away.

The Project

Influenced by Mary Iverson's work, this project will deal with how mankind is killing the planet.  The students will write a one page paper on why littering is so harmful and why it should be stopped.  They will be expected to research statistics and facts about littering in America.  This paper will be displayed with their work.

As for the artwork, the students will find an image of a landscape that they can draw and paint over.  This image can be a painting or a photograph.  The image will need to be scanned and printed onto a medium size piece of drawing paper.  The students will then use perspective drawing to include into the landscape different objects that are commonly littered.  They will research some of the most common littered objects and make a list of the objects that they choose to include in their drawing.

The image will be drawn over with pencil and then drawn back over again with pen for a darker line and higher contrast.  The students will explore perspective drawing and how to effectively use line and shape to render an object in space.  Once the drawing is complete the students will color over their objects with markers, colored pencils, crayons, or paint.  There will be no restrictions on which material to use for coloring, but the students will be expected to choose only one so that their piece will be consistent.

There will be emphasis on the elements and principles of design as the students work.  They will explore line, shape, color, space, value, and rhythm.

Classroom Example: