Light and Shadow Explorations
Light and shadow are fundamental parts of the world around us, making this exploration space ideal for observation, careful noticing, and tinkering. Learners of all ages can be fascinated by the interplay of lights, shadows, reflections, and refractions. Explore prompts suggested on this page, make some discoveries, create art, and experiment with a tinkering approach to developing a deeper understanding of the world around you! Share what you see and try out using the hashtag #ExploringLightAndShadows.
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Make a Shadow Portrait
Carefully arrange objects and lights to create a shadow that looks like a face!
Extensions and Connections
More resources, extensions, and connections about exploring light and shadows.
Shadow Tracing
Go outside and find something permanent (a sign, hydrant, mailbox, or even a tree will do) and bring some colored chalk. Trace the shadow of your object at different times of day, making sure to use a different color each time. How does the shadow change as the sun moves across the sky? Can you predict what the shadow will look like next?
Tinkering Tenet: Express Ideas Via Construction
A big idea with shadow tracing is making visible the effect of time on the way the world looks, specifically shadows. Tracing them over the course of a day is a great way to visualize this process, especially for the youngest learners!
Go on a Shadow Hunt
Go outside or look around your house for interesting shadows! Are there some time of day that seem to make shadows more interesting? Morning and evening might lead to shadows looking particularly long and distorted, while closer to noon things will look smaller and sharper.
You can also find natural materials like sticks, leaves, and rocks and make your own interesting shadows on the ground. Here, the name “Viva” is spelled with shadows by carefully arranging sticks on the ground. What would want to write?
Bring Your Own Light
Step 1 – Experiment
Grab a light source and a few objects around the house that you suspect might make interesting shadows. Experiment with the position of both light and objects to see how they affect the shadows — can you make them HUGE, small, or just plain weird? How do shadows behave when they wrap around ceiling corners, when they drape over irregular surfaces, or on semi-transparent ones like bed sheets? What stories can you tell with them? Can you make colored shadows with just a white light? Can you combine shadows to make interesting designs?
Light source: It’s important to have lights that can be easily moved and adjusted to support explorations of shadow size and position. We try to use point sources as lights to create clean, crisp shadows. Did you know that different light sources will make different looking shadows? Our main light source, the sun, is so far away that it acts as a point light source, which means all the light appears to come from a single point. This creates nice sharp and defined shadows. Some good point light sources you can easily find at home are maglite torches (but make sure to unscrew the front lens or you will get a diffused light), the flashlight function of most smart phones, or even a candle!
Surface: Think about what projection surfaces will support different kinds of investigations. Hanging up a big sheet or using a blank wall supports large-scale dramatic play and working together. Making individual stations by clamping a canvas to a table or replacing one side of a cardboard box with a screen can create building spaces that feel personal and protected.
Materials to explore: There's no wrong path when choosing materials to investigate. Some general categories we like to use are colorful materials, materials that bend light, reflective materials, and shadow casters. Your kitchen is likely to have objects that fall into each of these categories!
Step 2 – Make Art
Now that you have a better idea of how objects and lights interact to create interesting and beautiful patterns of lights, reflections, and shadows, you can create wonderful art based on those concepts. Find a flat surface, and cast some interesting light pattern on a piece of white paper. Mason jars and other glass containers are particularly spectacular when you shine a light inside of them, but you can play around with relfections and shadows from kitchen utensils, and anything else you’ve experimented with so far.
When you are happy with the pattern, use pencil, pens, and markers to trace it, color it, and interpret it in as many ways as you want! Check out this page from TinkerLab for a quick and easy way to get started with light drawings.
Tinkering Tenet: Merge Science, Art, and Technology
On their own, science, art, and technology all make for interesting, fun, and rewarding explorations. But when you mix them together, you get a veritable tinkering trifecta in which technological tools and scientific principles let you express your own artistic vision. Plus, we find that when you make something that is personally meaningful to you, you get especially motivated to make it work, leading to tons of great insights into your chosen tools.
Shadow Remix
What do you see? Similar to seeing shapes and animals in cloud formations, shadow remixes invite learners to use their imaginations and share what they see in a shadow. This open-ended prompt encourages remixing and building on the ideas of others, and creates a wonderful series of images in the end.
You can make a shadow remix using a range of tools and materials:
Paper and pen: Trace your shadow on a piece of paper and draw what you see on top. For remixing, make photocopies of the shadow outline and share it with others.
Digital tools: Draw on top of a photo using a photo-editing tool like Procreate or Markup on your smartphone or tablet.
Chalk and sidewalk: Take your shadow remixing outside and use sidewalk chalk to reimagine what you see. Return to your drawing after a couple of hours and remix it using the new position of the shadow.
Curious for more? Check out the Shadow Remix Project Page for more in depth information about this tinkering activity.
Make a Shadow Portrait
This project is a little bit more elaborate than the previous ones, but it is a fun, expressive way to transform shadows into figurative representation. The idea is simple: arrange materials that you find around your house or have collected so that their shadow will create a portrait: a recognizable face. It can be realistic or cartoonish, big or small, you can make it solid or play with transparency—the possibilities are endless!
This way of playing with light and shadows can be quite challenging, and a lot of experimentation is required to see some good results. The position of the light is important: best results are achieved by a light that is very low and to the side, or high and right above the materials. Finding ways of holding materials at different levels could also help, perhaps with stands and clothespins.
The process of making a shadow portrait requires lots of trial and error, playing with materials and turning them this way and that and observing how they respond to the light. Sooner of later a shadow will emerge that reminds you of something—a nose, a chin, or perhaps a beard. Seize on that, and start adding other materials to build up to a face. Soon you will become a shadow portrait expert!
Tinkering Tenet: Go Ahead, Get Stuck
When you tinker, you’re goin to mess up. You’re going to get frustrated, fail, and maybe even break a thing or two. We call this getting stuck, and believe it or not, it is a very good thing. Failure tells you what you don’t know, frustration is making sense of that failure in the moment, and taking action leads to a new way of knowing. Treat each problem that arises as a new problem to play with—rather than a problem to solve—and practice working through times of frustration without judging yourself. You’ll find that you develop an astonishing capacity for new understandings.
Extensions and Connections
Related tinkering projects
Light Play
A more structured way to explore light, shadow, and motion using a variety of simple materials and light sources. This project highlights the unusual shapes and patterns of light and shadow by inviting learners to weave them into a personally meaningful shadow story.
Light Painting
Create striking images and illusions using nothing more than a camera, a light source, and a little practice. When the camera shutter is open (and the room is dark) the film or digital sensor acts like a blank canvas. It’s as if the image is being drawn or painted by the light source as it moves through space.
Light and Shadows Explorations for Young Learners
Create striking images and illusions using nothing more than a camera, a light source, and a little practice. When the camera shutter is open (and the room is dark) the film or digital sensor acts like a blank canvas. It’s as if the image is being drawn or painted by the light source as it moves through space.
Artists Inspiration
Chris Bell
Chris is an Australian-born artist who has experimented with making drawings by using nothing more than… light! He creates reflections off of everyday objects and shapes them into recognizable scenes resembling light cave paintings
László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and artist in the Bauhaus movement. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. His work Light Prop for an Electric Stage, also known as Light Space Modulator, was one of the main inspirations for our Light Play activity!
Literacy Connections
Moonbear’s Shadow
Moonbear tries to outwit his troublesome shadow in this charming reissue of a beloved classic by award-winning author and illustrator Frank Asch. This wonderful book can serve as the starting point for many explorations related to shadows.
Everything Has a Shadow, Except Ants
A project between play, imagination, and science. The experiences and emotions of children, in the Diana and Gulliver municipal preschools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, as they grapple with shadows as immaterial life-companions, generative of discoveries and knowledge.
My Shadow, by Robert Louis Stevenson
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see…
Shadow Race by Shel Silverstein
Every time I've raced my shadow
When the sun was at my back,
It always ran ahead of me,
Always got the best of me.…