Brian Selznick Lesson Plan

It's half term and I've started planning out some of my upcoming lessons! This lesson was inspired by Brian Selznick's excellent book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Selznick is an author and an illustrator and I really love his densely shaded, heavily worked pencil drawings. They're really integral to the storytelling in his book, rather than just being a bit of superfluous page decoration.

I've designed this lesson so that students can learn various pencil techniques, and how to make optimal use of different grades of pencil. I also really want the young people to look at the ways Selznick uses mark making to add shading and texture to his images. As this is a Mixed Media Musings lesson, I couldn't leave it just at pencil drawing, so I added some additional lines and tones with graphite stick and blue grey and yellow grey Derwent Artbars. 

For part one of the lesson, I want students to select a drawing from the book and then make a transcription of it. I chose Selznick's drawing of the automaton.

I also made a copy of a detail from another page.

For homework and for the follow up lesson, I'm going to ask students to bring in a suitably evocative object from home and draw it in Selznick's style. I chose to draw a clown doll.