Kindergarten Self Portrait Books

By the end of the school year our kindergartners had lots of practice with both DRAWING FROM OBSERVATION (drawing what you see in front of you) and DRAWING FROM IMAGINATION (drawing what's inside your head).  We decided to take those skills and combine them by creating a self portrait book.  First, students closely looked at a portrait believed to be of and by Leonardo da Vinci below:

Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Man in Red Chalk, 1512

Students were asked what they could discern about this person.  By using visual clues from the drawing, students were able to tell that the man they saw was a very old at the time the work was created, because of the long beard and wrinkles on his face.  We briefly discussed how Leonardo da Vinci came up with a set of tricks to help accurately draw a person's face.  Additionally, we defined a SELF PORTRAIT as a picture artists create of them self.   We spent day one of our self portrait unit drawing our own face, by starting with the T across our face to correctly place the eyes and nose.  Students focused on including ALL the features on their face (most often forgetting eyebrows, eyelashes, and ears) and putting them in the right place!

Next, we challenged ourselves to look in the mirror and try to draw our face how we actually see it.  Many students were able to more accurately draw the shapes they saw on their face when paying close attention to it in the mirror.  When we were done, we erased the T and went over it in sharpie.  To make things even more challenging, the next series of self portraits we created had to show an expression.  We examined a variety of artists that were showing different emotions in their paintings, as well as photographs of children's expressing different feeling.  We discussed how much we could tell about the way someone is feeling by clues from their facial features.  For examples, furrowed eyebrows, scrunched up nose and wide eyes could infer someone is angry, while wrinkles on a fore head, eyebrows going down and a mouth that is opened can show a worrisome face.  We even brainstormed situations that would make people feel different ways and acting those feelings out.

Photographs of Children's Expressions

 

Artist Portraits

Self Portrait, Hockney

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890

Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940

Students had a variety of feelings to choose from and completed up to three self portraits conveying those emotions.  Lastly, students completed a self portrait in oil pastel, where they had the option of looking in the mirror as well as adding elements from their imagination, such as images in their background or on their clothing.  When all the drawings were completed, we organized them into a book seen below with clips, to give us the option of adding additional self portraits to them in the future.  

Student Examples of  Self Portraits from Observation

Student Examples of Expressive Self Portraits

Angry

Nervous

Annoyed

Furious

Happy

Happy

Excited

Surprised

Worried