By Stephanie Xiang
A finished print hanging on the wall may look as if it were carefully planned from the beginning. But for students in Foundations of Art, the process started in an unexpected way: listening to music and drawing lines on paper.
The recent Foundations of Art display in the Upper School shows how students transformed spontaneous, music-inspired sketches into carefully designed tessellations and finished prints. Behind each piece was a process of experimentation, revision, and decision-making that Upper School Art teacher Ms. Gina Reynoso and Visual Arts Chair Mrs. Amy Lee Story wanted students to experience.
Before students began creating music-inspired sketches, however, they first had to understand one of art’s most basic elements: the line. “The project began long before listening and drawing to music,” Ms. Reynoso said. Students studied how lines could be “long, short, thick, thin, curved, straight, rough, smooth” and how different types of lines could communicate different feelings and ideas.
Rather than using lines only to draw recognizable objects, students explored how different types of lines could express ideas or feelings. Students considered questions such as what “elegance” or “disorder” might look like, or even how they might represent the experience of biting into a pepper.
The class then connected visual expression with another art form: music. “We had our students listen to music because we wanted them to start making connections between auditory and visual rhythms,” Ms. Reynoso said. Students listened to the tones of instruments and changes in tempo and translated what they heard and felt into networks of lines.
Freshman Ridley McCamy said the music directly influenced the marks she put on the page. “The rhythm and tempo influenced the marks I made, causing me to create flowing, curved lines in some areas and more sharp, bold lines in others,” Ridley said. “The music helped guide the movement of my pencil.”
But the spontaneous drawings were only the beginning.
Students searched their sketches for several two-inch-by-two-inch designs that interested them. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of the different designs, they selected one and continued revising it. Ridley chose a section with what she described as an interesting combination of shapes, lines, and movement. She then simplified shapes and adjusted lines so that the design could repeat smoothly. “I looked closely at my original sketch and found a section with interesting movement and repetition,” Ridley said. “I then enlarged and refined that section, developing it into my final design.”
Those small sections became motifs that students repeated in different arrangements to create tessellations. According to Ms. Reynoso, changing the arrangement of a single motif allowed students to discover that one starting point could produce very different visual rhythms.
The change in materials added another transformation. Lines originally drawn in graphite, marker, or colored pencil took on a different character when students carved them into linoleum and used them to make prints.
The many stages also created challenges.
“The most challenging part was keeping track of all the different steps,” Mrs. Story said. “Students had to pay attention to details, make lots of design choices, and learn new printmaking techniques along the way.” Ridley encountered that challenge while trying to make her pattern repeat correctly and remain balanced. She said she had to plan carefully, make adjustments, and continually pay attention to how the shapes connected.
Sometimes, however, experimentation led students somewhere they had not planned to go.
Mrs. Story pointed to Harrison Deupree’s work as an example. Harrison developed a tessellation based on a path that leads the viewer through his design, an idea Mrs. Story said emerged through experimentation rather than from a predetermined result. “He took a creative, out-of-the-box approach,” Mrs. Story said. “It was a great example of how the creative process can lead you somewhere you didn’t necessarily expect.”
The project also taught students that visual rhythm does not require sound. According to Mrs. Story, artists can create rhythm through repeated lines, shapes, colors, and patterns that can move a viewer’s eye around a piece. Variation prevents repetition from becoming predictable. For Ridley, seeing her spontaneous sketch develop into a structured final piece changed her understanding of the artistic process. “It showed me that art often develops through a series of decisions rather than appearing fully formed right away,” Ridley said. “Small choices throughout the process can have a big impact on the final result.”
Those choices are not always obvious to someone viewing the finished work. Ms. Reynoso said students learned through the project that not every combination of lines and patterns produced an effective design. They had to evaluate their work, make changes, and sometimes repeat steps. “There is so much thought, consideration, and experimentation that goes into designing,” Ms. Reynoso said.
That process is captured by the message accompanying the artwork in the hallway: “It’s not random. It’s a process of choices.” For Ridley, that sentence took on new meaning after completing the project. “Even though the original sketch felt spontaneous, I had to make many choices about what to keep, change, repeat, and develop in order to create the final piece,” Ridley said.
What began with music, a pencil, and spontaneous lines eventually became the polished prints displayed on the wall. The finished pieces may be what viewers see first, but the experimentation, mistakes, revisions, and choices behind them tell another part of the story.
