I teach middle school in a small town, but no matter where I go, so many art students rush through a project, especially drawing and painting. What can I do with these early finishers? I have asked them to start another project, trying to focus more on it and be persistent, etc. I have so many whiners at times. I have also tried adding a sketchbook assignment or color pages. I am sick of color pages and they are too.
An artwork is a finished product; it's easy to infer from this that it sprang into being fully formed, and kids are bright enough to realize that they don't have the chops to perform on that level, so they're settling for less than their best. Have you worked with the kids to normalize making mistakes and making changes? The Education pages for one or another of the big art museums (the Met, the Getty, etc.) might have something that shows revision and rethinking, and if the kids are old enough you might also be able to make the analogy between putting in the work to polish a draft in English class (and how satisfying it is when a sentence really, really works) and putting in the work to produce and improve in art.
This is a good resource that teachers in my elementary school use: https://eleducation.org/resources/austins-butterfly. As TG suggested, you may need to teach them the process of revision as it applies to art. In addition, you could always have work the involves analyzing the work of others (not necessarily peers' work, but the work of famous or not so famous artists outside of school). This is something else that we did at my elementary school this past year, and it was interesting to see what the kids came up with as they used their knowledge from art class to interpret the work of others.
I apologise for the necropost. In my opinion, you need to show the children all the pluses in going through each project in detail, treating it responsibly and with curiosity. Raise their grades a little, but focus on the little things like the detailed parsing of each project.
