Self Portraits

Art II Self Portrait Project

For this assignment we studied Rembrandt and his use of chiaroscuro. Students had to use the grid technique to create a self portrait with high contrast.

Materials:

• Drawing paper
• rulers
• camera and photograph
• drawing pencils and erasers

Procedures:

1. To start you will need a camera to take the student's photographs. I hung up a black cloth on the white board and put a lamp right next to it to create a spotlight. I had the students come up one at a time to take their picture. That night I edited the pictures on my computer and printed off a 4 x 6 black and white photograph for each student. 
2. The students began by griding their photograph and then creating a corresponding larger grid on their drawing paper.
3. Next the students drew their portraits with pencils.

Student Examples

Pencil Grid Drawing

This was the first big project for my art I students, and the culmination of what they had learned of basic drawing skills from smaller projects.

Materials:

• Drawing pencils
• Erasers 
• Large drawing paper
• Rulers
• Photo sources printed out for each student

Process: 

1. Each student chose a  black and white photo of a variety of still lives. I tried to have a variety of pictures prepared that would interest each student. 
2. Students use their ruler to draw a grid on their photograph and then a larger grid on their drawing paper. They also had to include a 1 inch border on the drawing. We doubled the sized of the photos. So, we went from a half inch grid to a 1 inch grid.
3. Begin an outline of the objects in the drawing and indicate where the shadows will be. 
4. BEFORE starting with actually shading, the students must erase each section of their grid as they go. If they don't do this they will still have the grid visible on their paper when they are done. 
5. Its important that the students try to create a full range of values. 
6. To finish, go back and erase any smudges that got on the border. 

Mystery Collaborative Grid Drawing

This project was with my Art 1 students. Before we did this project we spent the week talking and learning about value and shading with a pencil. I gave a short introduction on the day we did this project by talking about what a grid drawing is and about how proportions are important when drawing from a grid.

To prep for this project, I found 4 photos online for the kids to draw. I then put each drawing into a word document and put a grid on top of the picture by inserting a "table" into the document. Next, I printed the photos off, labeled them with a number and letter, and then cut them up.

For the instructions, I gave each kid a 9 by 9 inch piece of paper. I then randomly gave out all the little pieces of the grid drawing. On the back of each piece of the grid there was a number and letter which would tell us later where the piece fit into the picture. So, to keep things organized, I had the kids label their paper with the same number and letter.

They had one class period (40 minutes) to complete their piece of the grid. Many of them tried to guess what the picture was but I made sure not to let on until it was time for them to piece it together.

The next day I had the class work together to assemble the picture. Meanwhile, I had two kids cutting out paper to the right dimensions so that we could tape the pictures down to something. Once they had the thing put together then I let them see the actual photograph so that they could check to see that all the pieces were in the right spot.