Snapchat Self Portraits

Yeah, I've been pretty awful about updating this here blog, but in the mean time don't forget to check out my articles over at the Art of Ed!

Okay, so here's the deal I just taught my favorite lesson of ALL TIME. I'm not even kidding. It was seriously the best. Never have I seen students so excited to make self portraits. I think several of my students were about to have a heart attack when I told them to open up Snapchat in class!

Nonetheless, these aren't super fancy. Just your plain old grid drawings were used to make these. Some major color mixing happened as students only had white and the primaries to create their skin tones! These 8th graders seriously rocked my socks off! Enjoy!

THEY'RE BACK-5th Grade Lego Self Portraits

The return of the lego self portraits.  You've probably seen these/my face floating around Pinterest (or at least I'm told by my fellow colleagues that my face is plastered on Pinterest).  The original project I did last year brought some major traffic to my blog.  I think part of the reason, along with the fact that legos are just awesome, was that shortly after I posted the project The Lego Movie came out and Lego Mania was upon us.  

This is probably one of my all time favorite lessons.  We cover a lot of information and it is fun, the kids love it and all find some sort of success!  The majority of this lesson is done with crayon, a few students did choose to use marker on the background.  To see a more detailed description of the lesson go here.  

I'm amazed as to how much I can see the resemblances in some of the portraits and I can pick out which lego belongs to each student. 

  

Surrealism Dreams

We spent the first part of summer school talking all about Surrealism and dreams.  We watched a Brain Pop Video on Surrealism, read about Surrealism, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali in this Scholastic Arts magazine.  After we had learned all about surrealism and how it can relate to dreams, students were given this prompt to write about "What's the strangest dream you have ever had?"  After spending some time writing  students created a self-portrait with their surreal dream serving as the background.  Students spent a lot of time translating their words to imagery, mixing colors, and using new watercolor techniques.  The inspiration for this lesson came from here.  I was in awe of the work these students did and wanted to at least try out a portion of this lesson.  

Teacher Example

Student's who finished early came up with a title for their artwork that correlated between their dream and painting.

6th Grade Roy Lichtenstein Self Portraits

6th Graders did a really nice job on this project.  We started off by learning a lot about the artist Roy Lichtenstein.  We watched this video and read through this handout.  Using iPads and computers students worked on editing their photo to make it in a comic book style.  They drew from the image they created. I had to stress to them to draw what they were seeing and not what they thought it should look like.  After seeing Lichtenstein's work, students set to work using only primary color markers (and black).  They were to fill in some areas solid, and use Lichtenstein's dots in other areas. 

 I had two very different types of students with this project; one group were the students who totally embraced the idea of using interesting colors on their face, and the other who were so self conscious about it they would work with their drawing on their lap so no one could see it. 

Even in this day in age, you know of the "selfie," many students were just so embarrassed to do this project.  It was not because of the colors, but the idea of the self portrait.  

Do any of you struggle with your older students at the idea of a self portrait? How do you go about problem solving it?

3rd Grade Wanted Self Portraits

This is a really popular project among the students.  It's one of those that every class sees it and wants to do it.  It's really a quite simple lesson.  We draw our portraits together discussing proportion and placement and fill them in with construction paper crayons.  Now the fun part is coming up with a "bandit name."  For this I give them the choice to use their first name or last name, but they must use an alliteration when coming up with a word.  For the most part I want students to think of adjectives, "describing words," but there are always some exceptions. 

Here are last years Wanted students.