In this project our little kids learned about portrait proportions. They learned that, no, the head is not perfectly round, but rather an upside down egg shape. They learned that eyes are not way up high on the head, but are in the middle of the head. They learned that, no, hair does not come out from the top contour edge of the head, but instead comes downs from the top contour of the head and may sweep across our eyebrows. The nose is between eyes and mouth and the mouth is made up of two parts - upper lip and lower lip. The neck is not a skinny stick jutting down from the head, but is instead a rather thick 'stem' with curves out on both sides and is as wide as the space between our ears. Voila! Proper proportions.
The first step for this project was to collage squares of paper all over our paper, in a neat and orderly fashion. This means starting at the top corner and working our way across and down. I had precut a variety of paper squares, sourced from old books of different fonts and coloration, sheet music, and painted paper. We were mindful of not putting two squares of the same paper next to each other, rather, we went for a balanced and varied look. We used acrylic gel medium (my favorite) for pasting our bits of paper. The rule is - brush gel medium on your paper (just where the single collage paper will be adhered), then glue down the collage paper, and then brush more gel medium over top of the collage paper. So, glue under, paste paper, glue on top. This ensures the collage paper is properly sealed to our paper. The kids got the hang of this routine pretty quickly.
We dried with a blow dryer so we could move on to step two: drawing the face.
I did face drawing demonstration on the white board while the kids followed along using thin brushes and slightly watered down black acrylic paint. Yes, they drew directly with paint brushes! As always, I 'talked out loud' as I drew, so the kids can hear my thought process and connect art vocabulary to line and shape. This was all we managed for session one.
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| Work in progress |
In the next class we added a slightly see through wash of white paint (I used gesso) to our background, behind the head. We added color to the eyes and lips (the kids know that the upper lip is darker than the lower lip) and added a white ink stamp to the black hair for a decorative effect.
This is one of my all time favorite projects I've done with the little class. An instant framer!
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| Kids 5-6 |
