Impressionist Artist Portrait in Charcoal

Students practiced the art of portraiture in this final project in charcoal.  K-4 drew Claude Monet, and 5th grade drew Pierre Auguste Renoir.  All grades practiced blind contour line drawing and gesture drawing warm-ups.  In a blind contour line drawing, students were not allowed to look at their paper while they drew.  They kept their eyes focused on their graphic materials, and once they started drawing they were not allowed to pick up their charcoal. They also could only use lines, no shading.  These were big challenges especially for our youngest grades, but we all had a lot of fun letting go of what the finished piece was going to look like and focusing on building connections between our eyes, brains, and hand.  The gesture drawing was a warm-up where students were given 3 or 5 minutes to quickly draw the portrait, filling the page and including as many details as possible.  You can find these warm-ups in students' portfolios.  The blind contour line drawing will not look like a portrait; it may look like a scribble, especially for younger students, but it is especiall valuable in building drawing skills. 

The artwork you see here is the final piece that we drew together, focusing on learning about the proportions of the face, and practicing filling the whole page.  We starte with a small line for the top of the head and another for the chin.  Students learned that the eyes are in the middle of the head, the hairs of the eyebrows are not one long hair but small little ones, heading away from the nose.  We also practiced dabbing off charcoal with a finger to make less important body parts like ears stand out less than important ones likes eyes.  This is called Emphasis in the Elements of Design.  Everyone did a wonderful job because everyone created a portrait that looked like a person.  The goal was not to create a drawing exactly like the person we were drawing, but for everyone to create a portrait of a man. (Men are easier to draw than women, so that is why both portraits are men.  If middle school had had enough time in their schedule we were going to draw Berthe Morisot, a female Impressionist artist, which would have been challenging because it is very easy to make a women look like a man by using too heavy of lines.)  Creating likeness is an advanced skill which you may see in some of which in the artwork of the 4th and 5th graders.