KEY COMPONENTS TO TEACHING DRAWING

I think the key components to teaching drawing include observation, investment, composition, and scale. Students need to be able to first create an appealing composition that will not only hold their attention but also the attention of their audience. Once they have mastered this technique of personal investment in object and composition they will have to become skilled in observation. Each object hold a place in the composition that will need to be represented effectively. Finally students will need to learn the skills that go hand in hand with depicting still life realistically as well as abstractly which includes measuring object relations with a pencil, observing negative space, color, and line.
Adolescents have the desire to achieve naturalistic renderings but also need to understand the importance of abstraction. In Vieth's third chapter of 'From Ordinary to Extraordinary' he discusses a technique in which students enlarge the scale of an ordinary object until the image is no longer recognizable; all that one will see are the shapes and colors the artist chooses to depict the object in. I believe this to be a technique strong enough to balance the need for naturalism while achieving abstraction simultaneously.