Art Class Selfies

Several days ago, I took photos of my students and told them to do a silly face and include both of their hands in the frame. We did this in between classes and I did not tell them what this was for. I was aiming for images to use for this week’s Gustave Courbet inspired self-portrait. This week in school, we looked at the history of self-portraiture, and explored visual and narrative techniques employed by old masters and contemporary artists.   I gave the kids the printouts of their black and white photographs and they created a 1” grid. They then worked to recreate their images grid by grid. We had previously done a lesson on gray-scale and they used their gray-scale cutouts to help find the lightest and darkest parts of their photographs, and illustrate highlights and shadows.

The final results were great- really cool compositions that they were proud of!

***I may have helped on one of these.