Portraits

Ms. Optie’s and Ms. Schwartz’s Kindergarten class had an Art Talk in March 2012 that was all about Portraits.

Each child started off the talk by sketching with pencil, and then painting with tempera, a self-portrait on a colored 5”x5” square of cardstock.

After they finished their self-portrait we studied several 20^th century artists by looking at photographs of those artists and then viewing a self-portrait by that artist (Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Normal Rockwell and Balthus). We then discussed the bone structure of the face by looking at a skull and feeling our own faces.

Next, each child received a hand-mirror and a new piece of paper and was asked to create a second self-portrait. Their work clearly showed that studying the different artists self-portraits and the structure of the face helped most of the children really change their self-portraits from line drawings to more dimensional shapes, which was very exciting!

Then we looked at portraits that had been done by the artists we had studied earlier.

Their final task was to create a portrait of the person sitting across from them.

The works-of-art were then put into a grid pattern and mounted on paper. Sprayed with UV protection, laminated and placed outside the school as artwork to welcome everyone who enters Emerson.

*NOTE - I went over many of the paintings with marker to bring out the original sketch lines that had been covered by the tempera paint. It helped bring the portraits to life.

Before:

After: