Portraits

Today we had a go at portrait drawing. First I asked the children to draw a portrait any way they wanted; I gave no instruction.

By L

By R

Next I showed the children how to use guidelines to make their portraits more realistic. We used 2H pencils for this to keep the guidelines light. Once the guidelines were in we added basic shapes. Finally we went over the parts we wanted to keep with a darker 2B pencil.

By L

By R

We compared the 2 drawings and discussed which we thought was best and why. We talked especially about the placement of the eyes roughly half way down the head, not on top of the head.

The children also experimental with skin colour mixing. They used a basic recipe of lots of white, a bit of yellow and a tiny bit of red. They varied the amounts of each colour and added some brown to make a range of skin tones.

Mixing skin colours

We will use the knowledge we gained today in the next few weeks as we study the human form in art.