This past Wednesday’s art class was all about our favorite artist..ourselves! With this being my first time teaching with Art Sphere I wanted to get to know my students better, and what better way to break the ice than talking about what we want to be when we grow up! We learned about self portraits and how over the years its one of the most popular forms of art. So for our self portraits we painted ourselves, but dressed as what we want to be when we grow up!
We took this project step by step since portraiture seems scary at first. but once we started most of the students were already excited and ready for the next step. We walked through each of the facial features discussing proportions and where they should be drawn on the face. (For example eyes being drawn midway through the face.) I also had stencils available to create the shape of a head and shoulders for students to trace if they wanted to. Once the face was complete the students dressed themselves up as their future selves! We had so many amazing ideas, a Construction Worker, Olympic swimmer, Babysitter, Photographer, a Police Officer and so many more!
During this lesson we learned an important skill when making art, and that’s planning out our artwork! We started this project with pencil because we wanted to make these perfect, and sometimes we make mistakes so it always important to use pencil first so we can fix parts we may not like before moving onto the next step! But once we were ready we traced over our pencil lines with marker. Doing this makes sure we don’t loose track of our lines while we use our watercolor paints.
At the end of the day we had an amazing array of portraits! everyone was so excited that they wanted to take them home right away but sadly had to wait for their watercolors to dry. We had such an amazing class this past Wednesday, I can’t wait to see even more amazing artwork this spring!