4th Grade Realistic Portrait of a Famous Artist

I have to apologize for not maintaining my blog this year! This year has been weird. I don't know what it is, but it's a strange year.

So my 4th graders have been pretty good so far...which is why they got to do this amazing project!


 The basics of this project are: choose either Vincent van Gogh or Frida Kahlo and draw their portrait on cardboard in pencil, outline with sharpie and paint with acrylic paint.

Teacher Sample: Vincent van Gogh

Day One: We did our research. I showed two Brain Pop videos about each artist.
We sketched the artist's portrait together in our Idea Books.

Day Two: Drawing on Cardboard and Outlining with Sharpie

I made copies of these Vincent and Frida coloring pages for the kids to use. They really break the portrait down into simple lines. We spent this class just drawing.

You can see my differentiated learning tiers below. 

 Day Three: Mixing Skin Tones

I demonstrated the process and formula for skin tones at the demo table. The kids mixed on palettes and painted their skin tone areas.

Here's my slide for the "formula"...and I get to talk about math and science with this step. 

If a student wasn't successful with creating their own skin tone on this day, next class they will have some pre-made peach they can use to fix theirs. But I wanted to push everyone to at least try to create their own rather than just "handing it" to them. 

I'm loving this Vincent!

Day Four: Painting everything else...include backgrounds!

I proposed the choice of " COPY or CREATE" your background. We got out the metallic sharpies and they could use lines and designs to create a pattern or they could try to replicate the original painting's background.

I like this think of this one as a Jean-Michel Basquiat

I'm definitely putting these in our art show this year...so we will probably touch up the black lines one more time before they go on display! 

Overall, I'd say this was a really successful project. We got to learn a lot about some very important artists and they got to experience using acrylic paint...which I made a huge deal about how awesome that was. And I've never done cardboard paintings with my kids before so this was fun! yay!