Personalized Self-Portraits

Doodling is not a mindless act.  It is meaningful.  It is an escape from reality, it is inspired by what we see, know, like, and experience.  In fact, many contemporary artists have adopted a doodle-ish approach to their artwork. It is a curious trend??? Gets me thinking - WHY?

 

8th graders collected images of patterns, textures, lines, and symbols, even quotes, lyrics, and other words that have meaning.  All these things we combined to create these personalized self-portraits with a doodle-ish twist.

 

I should mention, contemporary art is not the only focus here. 8th graders also learned something from the great Albrecht Durer.  He was a mathematician and artist credited with “inventing” the grid method.  So, we pulled out our rulers and took lots of measurements, creating a grid that guided us in the drawing these spectacular self-portraits.  I found this a great way to warm up to observation drawing ... really helps the eyes and hands stay in sync. 

Self Portrait Reductive Prints

Here I am, once again, with folders of art saved to my computer just waiting for a debut in cyberspace. I decided to post these reductive prints first ... for no reason in particular, just because.

Before beginning our printmaking, we focused on drawing our self portraits with correct placement and proportions.  We traced these drawings into a Styrofoam printing plate and then we printed layer one of our reductive print.

 

Afterwards, we cleaned off our printing plates, added pattern or a background to the negative space and hair and/or shirt if we wanted to jazz it up a bit.  This was simply done by pressing directly into the foam.  Then we cut out the skin (neck and face). This took some concentration, but we all did it like a master.  Now, using  remainder of the printing plate, we printing over top of our initial prints.   Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

William H Johnson Self Portraits

The artist William H Johnson painted pictures of people and memories from his childhood.  We asked ourselves what we want to be when we grow up and then got to painting the future.  Here are just a few to hold us over.  Works are still in progress.

LITCHENSTEIN SELF PORTRAITS

In 5th grade we studied Roy Lichtenstein - an artist that is greatly influenced by technology and comics.  This is evident in his use of Ben Day dots.  

Self Portraits.

 We decided to go incognito for this year's Self Portrait.

Artists all over the world make self portraits. We came up with thoughts as to why.  Here are just some of our ideas:

• for fun
• for practice
• to help the future learn about us
• in place of a photograph (cameras sure have changed the world)
• to make a version of yourself that is imaginary
• to share feelings and emotions and other things about your personality
• to show how "cool" you are...