Art II students recently explored the genre of the “selfie.” For this project we worked with four media in one piece — the student’s choice of: graphite, colored pencil, ink, art marker, chalk pastels, oil pastels, or watercolor. This gave students the opportunity to display their mastery of several media in one artwork. And it made for some lovely and unexpected results!
I’ve taught a similar assignment; however, this time we put a new twist on it. Portraits were broken down into tiny squares ala Chuck Close, then value was interpreted with black and white symbols or designs. This assignment required a lot of fortitude on the student’s part, but as you can see, there are some lovely results!
Art II Drawing students have been studying value and basic shading techniques. We did a collaborative whole-class artwork that really turned out beautifully–and was a good teaching tool to show how important the element of value is to successful artwork.
Each student was given a 1″x1″ square cut from a black and white copy of a photo. They were instructed to enlarge it onto a 6″x6″ square, paying careful attention to value and proportions. When everyone was finished, we glued the results together, and crossed our fingers! —one thing I found helped was laying out the pieces, letting everyone look at the “big picture,” and then letting them add or subtract value, etc. to enhance the drawing.
The fun part was that no one got to see the photo they were working from until we finished, so the result was a lovely surprise! Enjoy!
