Write a description of a haunted house. Be as descriptive as you can so that if someone read your description the reader would be able to get an image in their head of what your haunted house looks like.

I CAN:

• Use basic shapes to create a Victorian House Form
• Draw a "haunted house" that fills the paper
• Design a landscape around the house
• Use black liquid watercolor to create values and set a mood/atmosphere in my drawing
• Add details and textures with pen shading techniques such as hatching, cross hatching & scumbling.
• Finish my project by writing an artist's statement/story about my haunted house

I attended Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA for college and rented an apartment 2 blocks from campus in an unusual place. I lived in the top floor of the gatekeeper's house at Hollywood Cemetery, where 2 of our country's presidents rest in peace. This beautiful old Victorian Home is the inspiration for this lesson.

Victorian homes are a type of home that uses decorative design detail on the exterior of the house. Sometimes, more than one style of shingle or decorative moldings are used. Many people call them “Gingerbread” homes because of the great amount of detail applied.

The homes were prevalent in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
There is a region in San Francisco that has rows of Victorian homes called “Painted Ladies.” I got to take a group of students out to San Francisco years ago and we stopped by to see these beauties.

Victorian homes, with their mansard roofs, turrets and decorative columns, are often considered the quintessential haunted house. It is in this type of home that Norman Bates lurks and where the weird but lovable Addams Family reside. These types of houses were once the height of architectural fashion and a status symbol. So, how did these houses go from celebrated to creepy?

You can break anything you want to draw into simple shapes and these houses are an easy way to try this method. What shapes do you see in the picture of the house below?

• Look up ideas of victorian style houses to create a haunted house
• Use shapes to create an outline for your house
• Look at examples of Victorian homes and consider details for your house
• Add stairs, windows, doors, shingles and details

(Pictures from Deep Space Sparkle)

We will shade these and add jack o lanterns, skins fall trees, ghostly images in the windows, full moons and so on to create a spooky mood in these drawings.

Check out this article on why Victorian houses became the quintessential haunted house.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/why-are-victorian-houses-haunted/

By the end of class today you need the basic outline, spooky elements and some details added to your house. Submit a photo of your progress in Schoology.

***We will have 5 minutes tomorrow as bellwork to complete any drawing elements before we begin to use watercolor.

• Large range of values and can be mixed easily
• The color is more consistent than with pan watercolors
• The more water you mix with the watercolor, the lighter the color

Value can add detail, texture and atmosphere to a work of art. Creating a range of values is vital for a successful work of art.

With watercolor, more water means lighter values and less water means darker values.

• As a warm up...create a value scale like you see above
  
• Go from dark to light
• Create and label 9 different values

1. Paint the entire big rectangle with a light grey wash.

****While this is still wet, lay your board flat, take a piece of the tissue, and roll it across the top of the paper. . . you can do this more than once . . .

2. Now, draw the furthest mountain ridge with pencil. Using a slightly darker Next, paint this light gray wash from the pencil line (the mountain ridge) down -- to the bottom of the rectangle. Remember to have your board tilted, so that gravity helps you keep a "bead" at the bottom of your wash. Each time you pick up more paint on your brush and come back to the paper, you will only touch this bead of paint, while you work your way down to the bottom. Don't go back to what you've already painted.

3. Bring this value all the way down and let it dry a moment.

4. Then, draw another pencil line, depicting a closer mountain range. Paint a SLIGHTLY darker wash from the pencil line down to the bottom of the paper.

5. Add another pencil line -- tree-lined hills. No details, just indicate by the edge that these are trees. Then, paint the bottom two squares of the value scale with this stronger wash, and then paint from the pencil line down to the bottom of the paper. If, after painting this, you feel that you haven't made the wash a dark enough value...make it darker

6. Add a black, no water, hill along the bottom.

Slow down your pencil application, control your pressure, use a random circular motion, the pencil values will be very smooth. This process gives you the chance to build up the pencil values through layering.

Takes practice to get smooth even tones.

Smudging is down with a variety of tools such as paper stumps (tortillions), a dry paint brush, paper towels. While some people use fingers, this gets messy quickly and adds oils to your paper. It’s best to keep your actual hands clean and off your drawing surface as much as possible! Smudging is generally much faster to accomplish. You can push pencil around the paper and cover areas very quickly.

Beginners tend to gravitate toward smudging and abuse the technique altogether. Make sure smudging isn’t the only pencil shading technique you use.

Your subject matter Should dictate the type of shading you should use.Smooth shading & smudging should not be used for subject matter with texture (trees, bushes, hair). You can use lines and strokes build up in a way that yields a variety of tones and has a textured look.

You can spend plenty of time experimenting with various pencil textures. The drawing above was a kind of controlled scribble to yield the more obvious texture. Both pencil pressure and layering were used to vary the darkness and lightness of each area.

Textured shading is a great way to break up the sameness of your drawings. When a texture is used for one object compared to a less textured or smooth area of other objects, you can really create a visual separation between the various objects.

Hatching & crosshatching is creating values with layers of parallel lines. Think of each layer of pencil as a set of lines. Numerous sets of lines can be layered on top of each other, changing the value of the pencil.

More lines create the darkest areas of pencil value, while fewer lines that are spaced other apart create lighter values.

One of the benefits of crosshatching is in the logic of the technique. As long as the lines are drawn with the same spacing and pressure it’s a snap to control the values. More sets of lines will result in predictable value changes.

Your finished Haunted House must have the following things:

• A "Victorian Style"
• Details on the house (windows, doors, shingles, wood, stairs, etc.)
• A spooky landscape
• Shading that creates: texture, atmosphere & detail)

Once complete, submit online and create a short story that will become your script for the green screen video you will be creating.