Friday, May 24, 2013

Mixed Media Portraits



     In third grade at Brimfield, we are trying soooo hard to finish these cool mixed media portraits before school is over.  It's definitely one of those projects where I wish we had just a little more time to work on them (don't get me wrong....I am THRILLED that summer is almost here!).  I haven't done this project before (I found inspiration from The Artroom), and I might actually bump it up to 4th or 5th grade in the future.  I think the older kids would work a little quicker and have more time to do even more with media during our 6 week art class sessions.  I love the concept of this lesson, though, and the third graders really enjoyed their independence with their media choices.

    We started by learning about three mixed media artists, Michelle Caplan, Robert Rauschenberg, and Karen Michel.  On this introductory day, I took a photo of each student.  Before our next class, I used the "create a poster" option on Picasa and enlarged each student's photo onto 4 sections and printed them in black and white.  The kids started out by adding dry media right on top of one of their photo pieces, then we did wet media, then collage, and then all media was open for the kids to use.  I need to tweak this a little, but I think there is a lot of potential here!










5 comments:

Christie - Fine Lines said...

I love the enlarged size of these. I used to do something similar (just regular 8 1/2 X 11) with 2nd graders and it was always a BIG hit for Open House. I have never tried the poster option on Picasa -- will have to give it a try. THanks for sharing!!

Miss said...

Completely echo Christie's comments- the large size is so impressive and I, too, had never heard of this poster feature before. Thanks for sharing these- they all look wonderful!

Mrs. Susa said...

K! Awesome! I'll have to try this poster option!! =)

Anonymous said...

They did dry media (crayons, chalk, pastels,colored pencils and/or markets) on each piece first or solely on one piece? I'd love just a little more direction if you can please.

Unknown said...

They were supposed to have one piece that was exclusively dry media, one piece with wet media, one piece with collage, and the 4th piece could be a mixture. Lots of students ended up confused on this part though, and had all kinds of media all over the place!