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!!!

Wow!  This was truly one of those art projects, you know, THOSE ones.  The kind of project that was top notch and students all learned so much through the process.  I honestly have chills just thinking about it. This was one of the most successful art projects that I've taught in a while because each student challenged themselves and grew as an artist during the entire creation process.

I got the inspiration for this when a High School art teacher that I know posted photos of her High School students doing a similar project and I felt confident that I could adapt the project for my current 3rd grade artists.  

The goal of this project was to only use primary colors (red, blue and yellow) and white and black for this project.  That means that the skin color, shadows and highlights, hair colors, etc etc were all mixed using only primary colors!  This took some trial and error and lots of mistakes before students created the correct colors.

We started this project with mirrors in front of us.  Each student studied themselves in the mirror and drew their bust (head and shoulders) onto their papers.  

Once we started painting, students started with their skin colors.  After mixing and finding a color that worked, they painted all of their skin on the drawing.  To add highlights and shadows, they used their skin color and added blue and/or black to create shadows and added white and/or yellow for the highlights.  

They used this same technique on their hair and shirt as well.  For the background, they had freedom to do whatever they wanted.  The students worked so hard on this project and were so proud of the outcomes.  When teachers and parents walk by the art display in the hallway, they are shocked that the students mixed all of the colors themselves.

​What amazing artists I get to teach!