Were You Born In A Barn?

Portraits.

I think portraits are every kid's nightmare.  
My kids breathe a very heavy groan when I announce 
we will be working on portraits or self portraits.  

I asked them this year - why do you have this fear?

"It is just scary!  Our pictures never look right!"

So this year I proposed a twist on our first grade portrait unit.

I found some incredible photos to share with the kids.  Check them out here http://vectroave.com/2013/04/animal-portraits-by-yago-partal/

I asked the kids to imaging they were from a family of animals!  
What animal would you imagine to be from?

Hands went up and they all knew immediately what kind of animals they would be!

The sketches were fun!  All new shape was realized with snouts and beaks!  
No scary people noses here!

....and then the painting began.

Check out that awesome sketch!

We laid in the background first so we didn't have to paint around anything later.  That is the cool thing about paint - you can paint on top of the background for a clean line!

Then we moved on to the outside frame.

Then our "person" is painted.

Finally some details. Some chose to add details around the frame and others chose to add details inside the frame.  Isn't art awesome?  So many individual choices!

This project took two 45 minute classes to paint.  

I will show the finished portraits in another post.