Graph Paper Drawing – Where Art and Maths Combine.

We had some friends over last week, and after almost a whole day running around, jumping on the trampoline, dancing, dressing up, playing vets, and chasing chickens by late afternoon everyone need to sit for a bit. When this happens I often get out a giant piece of paper so everyone can draw together, but on this occasion I had a different idea…

Without saying much I plonked a pile of graph paper on the table and some markers, and was pleased to hear some encouraging ‘ooohs’ as the kids each selected a sheet and got to work.

I customised and created my graph paper at incomptech. They have lots of options for graph paper – the regular square kind, trangle, haxagonal, circular, polar and more. I was easily about to select the size of shape I wanted, the thickness and colour of the lines and more. Then it is just a matter of saving them as a pdf file and printing them out.

Using the regular square paper we made simple repeating patterns, checker board designs, we combined squares to make larger pictures and divided squares into triangles and smaller squares and even octagons to make all kinds of interesting images.

The triangles and hexagons also worked well for patterns and pictures. Morgan worked hard to colour an entire sheet of triangles, creating a scene from Eden (a minecraft type game for the ipad)

The circles were great for patterning and the spider webs inspired all kinds of fun.

Even though this was a really simple idea, there was so much creativity happening with lots of incidental maths concepts thrown in for good measure!

Many thanks to Free Range in Suburbia for allowing me to share photos of her gorgeous girl and her awesome creations.

Find more fun drawing activities here.