Picasso Relief Portraits

When I went to my state’s art education conference this fall, I saw a really cool project idea at the United Art booth. It was bright, colorful, and a relief sculpture! You can find it here. They gave me the lesson plan for it and I have been working on the sample for my students. I’ve taken pictures of most of my steps so that I can share with my students when they are ready to make it. Feel free to use it. 🙂 I started with painting the background piece of cardboard (8×10″).

Then I drew out my main head shape, painted it white, and cut it out.

Glue some smaller pieces of cardboard to the back and then glue it down to your background.

Create a profile view of just the head – not the nose, eyes, etc.

I painted another piece of cardboard white and then drew out the rest of my main pieces – eyes, lips, nose, forehead. I also added cheeks, eyebrows, and lids. The more pieces you add, the more interesting it can be.

I used my scraps from cutting all my other pieces to create the hair and neck. Now it’s ready to paint!

I painted with tempera and let it dry before using some black lines to add some depth and really make it pop!

I love this project and can’t wait to try it with my 6th graders!

UPDATE! We completed this assignment and the results are awesome! Check ’em out:

So proud of these!!

Play that funky music, Picasso!

It’s time for my third graders to learn about Picasso and all of his guitars and then make one of their own with painted paper. …maybe I should have called this post Picasso’s Painted Paper Pickers.

Let’s be FRANK: Picasso Rocks!

Saw this project on Art Projects for Kids and thought it would be a festive way to discuss Picasso with my second graders. They have totally loved looking at his crazy Cubist paintings and then making their own version of Cubist Frankenstein.
We drew their Frankie with sharpie and then colored it all in, including some spooky things in the background. The original plan was to look trough magazines for the eyes but it was near impossible to find eyes big enough to go on the monsters. I ended up doing a google search for “eye” and just printing the results. It worked out well.
Check out some of our finished pieces!