My bigger kids did a portrait proportions lesson, so I figured, why not also have my younger kids do one too? I mean.....everyone needs a refresher on how to draw properly proportioned faces, and I was pretty certain that my 4-6 year olds had never been taught this before.
I decided to do a 'before and after', partly to be able to show them their improvement, and partly for my own curiosity of wanting to see their natural yet 'untamed' portrait drawing skills... before enlightening them :)
Below are the 'befores'. Students were simply asked to draw a face with hair and neck. Yep, eyes are at the tippy top of the head and mouth way at the bottom. No eyelids, sometimes no lips. Hair is a thin strip at the top of head. Necks and shoulders are undefined or not at all present.
The bottom right sample was done by my nearly 5 year old son, who accompanied me in the Art Room the week before, while I was planning a Modigliani project, so.... his version is clearly influenced by Modigliani's long nose and neck, high almond eyes and small pouty mouth. So still off, proportionally.
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| 'Before' portrait drawings |
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| 'After' proportional portraits |
To give our portraits some zing and character, we began by using various stencils to add bright, bold color with foam rollers and acrylic paint. We dried with our hair dryer. We used tracers for the head shape, which I had prepared using cardstock. I don't usually use tracers, but in this case, I wanted quick and accurate face shapes, so we could move onto our feature drawing. Then we drew our portraits with proper proportions following my guided drawing on the white board. We used black permanent marker, no pencil!
Once drawn, we painted the inside of our face with white gesso, allowing a bit of the pattern underneath to shine through. We painted our hair in our choice of 'not realistic hair color', using tempera paint. I needed this to be one session project (90 minutes), and might have had them add color to eyes and lips, had we had more time. But in the end, I'm glad we didn't, because I really like the simplicity of these, and find the white faces play off the colorful background well. I love these.