Silberzweig Portraits

In the world where selfies and Instagram pics are the go to for self-expression for so many of my students, I continue to search for ways to get them to work on portraiture in their art. The idea of self portraits is always met with disdain, horror, and a ridiculous amount of eye rolling. So, I’m in constant pursuit for a way to grab their interest, and meet them at a comfortable place that allows them, and me, to see they can step out and be original in the process of creating portraiture, even if it’s not of themselves.

This year, I stumbled upon the work of Sandra Silberzweig, a Canadian born artist, that uses the elements and styles of cubism, folk, expressionism and modern art. She is inspired by many artists, but states on her website that it is Picasso's work that really speaks to her. After perusing many of her images from her online gallery, I thought her work presented just what I was looking to try with my students. It presented an opportunity to explore portraiture, abstraction, line, and color to create these magically intriguing images that peeked interest and ended up captivating not only the viewer, but the student artists as well.

While chalk would have been my preferred medium with this project, I opted to have the students use a watercolor resist technique, since so many have an aversion to the texture of chalk. I think the next time I do this, I will use chalk and we’ll snag some gloves from the first aid kit for those who need them. 

As you can see, there was no lack of creativity in these Silberzweig inspired portraits and each of them is a true original that shows the personality of the student artist.

Near and Far Perspective Crowds

I have had kids tell me that when something is far away, it is not smaller.
Literally, they are right, but visually, they are wrong when it comes to showing perspective in a setting.
Realism in Art( I feel like perspective is a part of that) is frustrating for my third grade students, so I decided to show them the elements of perspective without getting hung up on creating a realistic piece of work. (like the playground scene my curriculum suggests)
I took a page from Pam's Modigliani lesson last month and changed the people in our crowd portraits into people-ish.
People-ish people resemble people, but not in a perfectly real way.

Example Below 

Because I am a bitmoji loving 50- something, we made our crowd out of cartoon characters.
The objectives were still to teach near and far perspective, overlapping, and how people look smaller visually when they are far away.
A fifth grade student who is exceptionally talented at Minecraft and Pokeman character drawing, came in and gave us a lesson on creating made-up creatures(this was a good shift for him as well). I love it when students teach students. He was prepared. He even made us ALL call him Mr. Jones(Jones substituted for his real name).

The third grade then played a partner game of "Roll a Character". The dice thingy with cartoon faces.
They went bananas. They were so excited about their created characters.
Next, they quickly sketched out (lightly) their crowds of characters. The only rule to this game was to overlap, make each row of heads smaller, and to create a new face for each character.
To keep it graphic and awesome, we just added black sharpie. I added a quick impromptu lesson about every dark/light area helping draw our eye around the composition.
Crowd Cartoons-the bomb.com


working large and adding a background



so many interesting faces!



So creative!



adding dark and leaving light areas



Texture too!