Monochromatic Self-Portraits

The end of the year is always fun! We are finishing up our final project for the year and on to finals. For 9th grade, their final project was monochromatic self-portraits. I go over monochromatic each year, but change up the project for each grade level.

Each group received a color on their desk upon arrival. This is always fun.. many want to move groups because they think their color is hard. I just tell them, "try it and if you are having problems, I'll sit with you." This works :) they try it and if/when they get nervous about going lighter or darker, I'm sitting with them comparing colors, with the entire group to see if they got the same tint or shade.

There are a few steps I give to make sure this project turns out to their liking. It's not fun when they paint themselves and they really don't like it. That's discouraging as an artist and a teacher.

Day 1: I took their picture and printed them out. It took about 10 minutes for everyone to stop showing their picture with each other. Once we were past that, we started to outline all major lines on the face, then find any shadow shapes. This is where they started to get nervous. They were destroying their pictures... Once they had lots of crazy shapes on their face, they had to number them from 1 to 7. 1 being the lightest and 7 being the darkest.

Day 2: Next, they had to create a value scale on their paper using their groups paint color. This took almost 2 class periods. During this time, they were also using the light box to trace all the lines they made on their face to their paper they were painting on.

Day 3: They started working on their faces. Painting in each shape they had with the corresponding tint or shade. Form this point, it took the two 9th grade classes 3 class periods to complete.

So, here are our finals for this, 2016-17 school year.

---