Self-Portraits

This is one of my favorite projects. The fact that the kids are making pictures of themselves is almost automatically engaging. They love using the mirrors when trying to reproduce their own personal hairstyle.

I made sure to stress that we are learning just ONE way of portraying a human face and we looked at examples as varied as Giacometti, Da Vinci, Kokoschka, Escher and Cezanne.

Our biggest challenges was placing the features correctly on the face. The stubbornest misconception is that the eyes belong nearer to the top of the head than to the bottom when in fact the eyes almost always fall EXACTLY halfway between the top of the head and the chin. We measured a photograph just to be sure. The kids laughed at photo-shopped images of a person whose eyes are roughly where the forehead ought to be; whether you compensate by lengthening the nose or moving the mouth higher away from the chin, it just doesn't look quite right.

Although we all could SEE the problem, we still had to fight an instinctive urge to place the eyes too high. Luckily, our model was Amedeo Modigliani (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-modigliani-amedeo.htm#), whose portraiture usually includes a little distortion and elongation!
 
 
The kids' work is looking great so far! Many students had to overcome a perfectionist streak and an intense need to erase anything on the page that didn't match up to the picture in their head of what their picture "should" look like (or maybe, since it's a self-portrait, it was just vanity). I saw sooo many really great pictures being erased that I confiscated the erasers and we had a discussion about who an art critic is and what they do. I tried to convince them that they were being particularly harsh critics of their own work, and we practiced the difficult skill of embracing chance and inadvertent strokes of brilliance. Their pictures are really incredible!

That vertical line through the center of the top two pictures puzzled the kids at first and perhaps felt like a blemish on their meticulously created masterpieces, but they seemed okay with it and even excited once they heard what its purpose was. I'll save that piece of information for a later post.