Art Lesson Demo

On Tuesday, September 30, my class did group presentations. We did our presentations according to ‘season' teams. I am in the ‘spring' team and we decided to do a visual arts lesson on abstract self-portraits my classmate Karim learnt about last year. You start with a piece of construction paper, any colour or shade, and then use oil or chalk pastels to draw shapes and different shaped lines to colour on top of using complimentary colours. As an example, orange is a complimentary colour to blue so you would colour one side of the face with orange and then the other side of the face would be blue.

In our lesson, everybody in the class made their own self-portrait. The art looked so lovely so we decided to pin their work up on the wall! Here are my class’ self-portraits:

I wanted to dig a little deeper to see how I would be able to incorporate this art lesson in my practicum or my future teaching career. Since my next practicum in grade 5, I looked at the grade 5 PLOs. I think A5: create 2-D and 3-D images that express personal identity, is appropriate to this lesson. The abstract self-portrait is an expression of self because first of all it is a drawing of the self, and second of all, the colours chosen to complete the artwork can be favourite colours or be symbolic colours that means something to the student. Students can explore their identity with this art project because it is very flexible and abstract. I would love to use this idea in a future art lesson.