Saturday, December 29, 2012

A self portrait in 7 steps

Portraiture is easily becoming my favorite skill to teach because I love seeing student growth evidenced in each draft.  Expeditionary learning schools emphasize the learning process and encourage students to do drafts, engage in critiques and reflect on their work.  As an artist, I appreciate this process.  Here is one student's split face portrait with all the steps included.
 
We start by drawing a portrait on our own.  Pretty good skill level, don't you think?

Next, I teach the proper proportions through a step by step demonstration using a premade face template.

We try a second draft but this time we look in the mirror to draw the features more closely to our own.
 
A third draft gets us closer to a self portrait.

Before we start our final, we do a simple silent critique where we list grows (things to be improved upon/things to change) and glows (things that are done well/things to keep).  As always our language is KIND, SPECIFIC, and HELPFUL.

Final draft we draft half a face and the other half has symbols representing our interests.
 
Lastly, upon completion, we write a reflection where we think back on our work and reflect on our learning process.

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