Commissioned Illustration

In this lesson, students learned about commissions and made their own illustrations from a prompt.

Essential Questions:

• How can an artist support themselves through their work?

• How can artists promote themselves?

• How can artists use images and text to communicate an idea?

Standards:

• Anchor Standard 11: Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding

  • VA:Cn11.1.IIa - Compare uses of art in a variety of societal, cultural, and historical contexts and make connections to uses of art in contemporary and local contexts

Linked Assessment Outcomes:

• Students will learn that they can create an artwork in response to a prompt as a way to financially support their own art practice.

Reflection:

I was able to learn so much about the students through this exercise. I found that some students really shined when given an open ended prompt and some students really struggled with the idea that there was no “right” answer. There were also students who wanted their drawing to be perfect despite that this was a quick sketch activity. After the first class I added a time limit to try and keep students from overthinking the prompt. I also found that many of the students inserted humor into their sketches. Through this sketch activity I was able to adapt future instruction to give students some additional tools to help them with future projects. We discussed how free association can help artists create new projects and we made political cartoons where students could continue to use humor in their work.