Picasso inspired portrait

Picasso inspired Portraits

Step 1) Picasso, Abstract Art and Cubism
For our first art lesson I chose a Picasso inspired project since the students have learned about the artist and Cubism in their arts unit already.
As an introduction to our project the students watched a video about Picasso, Abstract Art and Cubism. I showed the student some of his portrait paintings and we talked about Picasso's abstract way of painting and expressing feelings by showing a face from two or more sides in the same portrait.

Step 2) The Colour Wheel

In the next step I introduced the colour wheel to the students and we learned about primary and secondary colours, warm and cool colours and complementary colours. 

Step 3) Guide Line Drawing
After all students had a close look at the shown portraits, I handed out templates of a Picasso face with two different sides and references with the typical shapes of eyes, noses and mouths as Picasso used to draw them.
I guide the students to draw a Picasso face while using the whole space of the paper. Then they chose their favourite eye, nose, mouth and hair shapes and created their individual portrait.
After drawing the face with pencil, the students used a grayon to draw the oulines again.

Step 4) Introduction to Water Colour / Aquarell
I gave a demonstration on how to use water colour and the students learned that water colour really needs a wet paint brush...
The students then coloured their portraits by creating a warm colour side and a cool colour side of the face.

What we have learned:

Abstract Art uses your imagination to create it and understand it. Colours, shapes and mind can be however you feel creating them.

Picasso created a new style of art called Cubism.

Cubism is a style of art that uses different shapes and intersting colours to show ordinairy objects. A cubist painting shows all the sides of an object in the same picture.

Colours in abstract art are chosen to create a certain kind of feeling or mood.

Shapes in cubist art can still be recognised as what they are, but they can look like they were made of triangles, rectangles or squares.

Primary Colours red, blue and yellow cannot be created through mixing of other colours.

Secondary Colours green, purple and orange are produced by mixing the primary colours.

Cool Colours are blue, green and purple.

Warm colours are yellow, orange and red.

Complementary colours are any two colours which are directly opposite to each other on the colour wheel.