We’re on holiday for our mid-semester break and I decided to stay put to get some art done. Well the break is halfway over and I finally managed to squeeze some time in. I thought I’d do a self-portrait with acrylic gouache as I teach this next semester and I am a little rusty. Four and a half hours later I managed to pump this out in A3 size. I also photographed the process to create the video below. Not my best work but it feels good to do some artwork again! (That’s the problem when you teach art, you don’t have time to do your own.)
“To celebrate Youth Music’s 10th Birthday, 70 of the world’s greatest musicians and visual artists have created a groundbreaking body of collaborative artwork based on Rankin’s iconic portraits of musicians.
As part of National Youth Music Week 2009, Youth Music will take over Phillips De Pury London for a festival of art and live music featuring performances from Destroy artists.
Original works by Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon, Debbie Harry, Michael Stipe, U2, Mat Collishaw, Marianne Faithfull and many others will be auctioned to support the UK’s biggest music charity for young people.”
View the Gallery to see the original Rankin photo and how it was ‘destroyed’ by another artist. I think students would enjoy a project like this by using celebrity photos from magazines or even taking and using photos of themselves, which a partner could then reinterpret. I may consider this when I do portrait painting with grade 6 students next semester.
This whole Rankin approach sounds similar to a portrait party.
My first round of grade 6 students (11 years old) have just completed their self-portraits unit. Feel free to view the simple five week unit here. To introduce the unit, blind portrait drawings were done, which I blogged about before here. Students then used mirrors to draw their portraits without instruction (70 minutes). These pre-assessment drawings are included in the video, followed by their final piece. Some students made remarkable improvements.
I tried a different approach that was inspired from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Photos were taken and cross hairs applied. Students then drew these cross hairs onto their A3 sheets and a middle tone was then added over their paper. 2B~6B pencils were used to add further value and tone, and erasers for highlighted areas. If you teach portrait drawing, I have other ideas and resources on my wiki as well. I may consider a portrait party for a future group. Enjoy!
I am really digging these blind portrait drawings from my grade 6 students (11 years old). I’d love to give them a metre canvas with some paint and a thick brush! Using a mirror, students look at their reflections paying very close attention to the edges and details within their reflection. They slowly inch their way around the image, drawing what they see but they do not look at their papers. It was a warm-up activity (five minutes) for their self-portrait projects, which I’ll also post in the future when this first group has completed it.
Mr. Picasso Head allows you to click and drag facial features onto a canvas to create Picasso like portraits. Nothing spectacular but may get some art appreciation going and younger kids should enjoy it.
First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face we have already made a judgement about its owner’s character – caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592). Once that snap judgement has formed, it is surprisingly hard to budge. What’s more, different people come to strikingly similar conclusions about a particular face – as shown in our own experiment (see “The New Scientist face experiment”). (full story here)
View the 
