Portrait Artist Study - Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is an American artist.

Image source

Image source

Image source

Image source

Image source

Image source

Image source

For our self-portrait study we looked at his work and then created our own versions, 

using zentangle blackline masters as the backgrounds.  

We chose to do monochromatic pencil sketches for our portraits (but next time would be sure to use cartridge/drawing paper rather than just plain paper, to make sure the zentangle lines under our portrait don't show through because the paper would be thicker.)

Here are some of our efforts!

2019 "Self-portraits"

Here are some of our finished portraits as inspired by Nate Williams (see original post here).

So happy with how they have turned out!

Painting - atmospheric perspective

Term One 2016 - Year 5-6  pupils

Keith Haring - modern artist

Our Term Four art theme is based on a famous artist....

The Keith Haring website lesson plans page for teachers: http://www.haringkids.com/lesson_plans/

Biography details: http://www.biography.com/people/keith-haring-246006#synopsis - there is cool animated bio video on the website

How did he become famous?



A glimpse of some of Keith Haring's work - drawings, paintings, sculpture, animations:



Video of artwork made by my Year Six pupils in 2012, inspired by Keith's work. We took photos of ourselves in different action poses, cut out the shape and used them as templates to draw with black vivid on blank paper. We then coloured the shapes or the negative space around them by using concentrated dye and small brushes. To finish we then glued our original photo onto the art work so it looked as if we were part of the picture:



Keith Haring in action - city wall community art project:



Why was he involved in this project?



An idea for creating your own picture in the style of Keith Haring:

Van Gogh inspired landscape paintings

Saw a wonderful idea using Van Gogh's 1889 'Cypress Trees' painting on Deep Space Sparkle using chalk as the painting tool.

My pupils first discussed and compared the painting alongside Van Gogh's 'Starry  Night at St Remy' ...

They then chose to either do a daytime or night time landscape based on the two paintings. We looked at the technique used on the Deep Space Sparkle blog.

Daytime painters used white cartridge paper while the night time painters used black sugar paper. Everyone had access to the same set of paint colours: greens, blues, purple, yellow, orange and brown. 

First we cut out our hills and foothills shapes to glue onto the base paper. 

Then we began painting our skies using chalk dipped in paint and trying to use short strokes and to replicate the swirls and movement of Van Gogh's works...some pupils also chose to try to do a sunset or sunrise sky rather than just a blue daytime sky, while just four pupils chose to try a night-time scene...

Our next step was the hills, thinking about colour choices...

The foreground area was next...

We left the paintings to dry overnight and the next day we cut out tree shapes, glued them into position and painted them...

See all 21 artworks here on the classroom blog.

We discovered that the black sugar paper, being slightly rougher in texture, meant that the chalk would rub onto the paper as well while the paint was stroked on and therefore added shading and texture to the paint strokes, while the white cartridge paper was too smooth to cause the chalk to rub off.  So next time I would try to use sugar paper for all layers of the picture to help with that texture and toning.

Also from Deep Space Sparkle - cool and warm modern landscapes using chalk pastels - something else I would like to try!

Modern 3/4 portraits

Inspiration for these has come via my favourite art blog Deep Space Sparkle and was ideal for beginning our painting art focus for this term. Ours did not turn out as 'true to type' as what was in the DSS lesson but we are really thrilled with the 'modern' look our portraits have taken on!

In the first week of school we wrote 'I am...' poems and I wanted the pupils to paint portraits of themselves; they have always done full-face portraits so agreed they are ready to try a different angle.

We found these images of self-portraits by Van Gogh on Google images:

First we practised the line drawings as advised by Deep Space Sparkle - we used 1/2 A4 and pencils, doing two attempts before then moving onto A4 paper, first with pencil, then with crayons.

Next, we moved onto A3 black paper (the paint colours we will be using are so bright, we think they will look good on the black paper - it will be something different for a change!)  The outlines were done with white chalk (easy to paint over).

We first painted the faces and features. We aimed to be using short brush strokes like Van Gogh used.

Next we painted the background, our focus being to have a mixture of colours, again with the short brush strokes.

Our next step, once the paint was dry, was to add some highlighting detail with black outlines on the main features - we did this with black oil pastels.

Don't they look fantastic?!

Normally I would launch into a painting unit by first working the children through a couple of sessions of brush techniques and colour mixing.  But for this activity I just wanted to get a quick product so we could display them to make the room colourful and it has also given me a baseline to see what the pupils can do.

As we worked I talked about the importance of proportion (ie large paper, so draw the features much larger) and emphasised the correct way to hold a brush, as well as the use of newspaper to clean the brush before getting the next colour (I do not as a rule use jars of water for cleaning brushes while painting).

I did not really have a set criteria - just wanted the children to do what they could.  We will have more specific learning outcomes as the painting  unit progresses.