Hallelujah! The 5th graders have completed their grid portraits!! It was a feat, getting through measuring grids on our photos and project papers, and figuring out how to match box for box. Some struggled through the whole thing, but others really focused and persevered to create some impressively realistic portraits. I think 5th grade is the earliest age that can handle this kind of project- I usually see this process used at the middle and high school levels. So considering the developmental challenges of this project, our success rate was quite good.
They didn't come out quite how I expected, because once they were done shading their faces and erasing all the grid lines, there was a desire to change the background somehow. Some students simply cut out their portrait and glued it down to a colored piece of paper. Others decided to add a background in colored pencil or crayon. While these additions seem juvenile in comparison to their skilled portraits, I think the combination reveals their confused position between childhood and adolescence.
These background additions also show some more personality, and provided more choice options to how the final piece looked. Speaking of choice, students had lots of options. They could copy the photo, enlarge the photo, distort their image by using a wavy lined grid, or start with a collaged section of their photo to extend and complete it. Whereas the images above are all 9x12, the drawing below is 12x18. Very few students chose the distortion option. Finally I asked them if they would want to have their self-portrait on display or not. I know how self-conscious this age group can be, both about their bodies and their skills, making this a doubly potentially embarrassing project to have on display. Strangely, some of the best portraits were ones I was asked NOT to display. Maybe they don't want to show off either.
As students completed their portraits at different rates I had another simple project waiting in the wings. A recent visit for a meeting with fellow art teachers at Tyler yielded a stack of waste lithograph prints that the print department was getting rid of. I thought we'd use the grid concept one more time for assembling an image. I cut the prints into 2 inch squares, which disrupted any realism and left only interesting patterns, values, and lines.
I asked students to select 9 squares and puzzle them together to create a new image- making sure that no two squares that were originally together remained together (we were not trying to reconstruct the old image, but create a new one). Next students paired up to share their collages and brainstorm ways that their pictures could be more unified. I asked them to use black and colored sharpies to connect and unify the squares in order to lose the grid. They had to extend the lines, patterns, and values across the squares to blend them together.
At the end of class we brought all our collages up (some students made more than one) and they students pointed out which ones felt the most unified or complete as a single image. I was very pleasantly surprised at how much students enjoyed this exercise. Even my students who often seem the most demanding and helpless worked independently and successfully on this project. I believe it was because they had to be choicemakers more than imagemakers for this project. It was an exercise in aesthetics really, with only a little bit of added embellishment.
My students seem quite comfortable with abstract imagery. Even the Kindergartners and first graders understand the artistic possibilities of line, shape, and color. Realism seems to cause anxiety in the art room. I think this project could also work successfully with magazine collage squares in color instead of the black and white prints.
Next up I think we're going to do some compositional work in 5th grade, cropping a resource image to find a new composition.
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