4th Grade Self-portraits

As a teacher, there are few things as awesome as hearing your students saying "I love this project" and "this is my favorite project we've ever done in art class."  This self-portrait unit went super well this year and the 4th grade artists were really excited about it and proud of themselves.  I consider that a teacher win!

Before diving into the actual art portion of this project, I introduced them to six contemporary portrait/self-portrait artists.  We looked at the art of Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, Frida Kahlo, Diela Maharanie, Dean Russo and Jen-Michel Basquiat and discussed their distinctive styles.

Each student then selected one of these artists to do their self-portrait in the style of.  I photographed each of the 4th graders and provided them with the photo of themselves.  To take the pressure off of them for the actual drawing of the portrait, they used light tables and traced the contour lines of their photo onto paper before beginning.  

Once they had their base drawing down, they continued to look at the artwork by their selected artist and their photos of themselves for reference. They carefully drew a background and colored their skin/hair etc inspired by their selected artist.  

This allowed a lot of freedom of color use, patterns, etc but still gave them guidelines.  The students absolutely loved this project this year and many chose Dean Russo and Kehinde Wiley as their inspirations.  They turned out amazing!!!