Expressive Portrait Paintings

     I am so excited about the work our fifth graders did with these expressive portraits!  The kids worked really hard at the new strategy of drawing with a grid, and I couldn't believe how well they did with it.  For these artworks, we looked at the portrait works of Roy Lichtenstein and Norman Rockwell, and particularly looked at how expressive the subjects are in those works.  I then photographed each student making an expression, we gridded them, and the students got to work.  We cropped the photos (like Lichtenstein) so that the viewer would really focus on the great expressions.

     The students used tempera paints to make these artworks so vibrant.  Each student mixed colors and tried to match the colors from their photos.  We also experimented with using water to make colors more translucent.

     When their paintings were finished, the students completed Venn Diagrams comparing and contrasting Roy Lichtenstein and Norman Rockwell in support of our district-wide effort to use Marzano-inspired teaching strategies.