Instructional
Objective
- The students will understand and apply
media techniques and processes.
- The student will use their knowledge of
structures and functions.
Curricular Integration
How often are children reminded by the adults
in their world to brush their teeth, wash their faces, and comb their
hair prior to going to school? What would happen if by some chance
they woke in the morning to realize that they couldn’t comb the hair
and had to leave the house with something worse than a bed head as the
character Oliver is faced with in the book Bedhead by Margie Palatini.
This book is consistently a hit with First Grade students and could
easily be incorporated into their writing program by having the
students write stories of their own bed head messes in the morning.
These could be displayed with the bed head portraits completed in the
art room integrating their art into the regular curriculum. This is a
fine example to introduce Voice from Six Traits Writing to your
primary students.
Materials and Equipment
12”X18” white drawing paper
permanent markers
oil pastels
skin tone tempera
watercolor paints
9.5”X6.25” oval tracing patterns
Resource Materials
Bed Head by Margie Palatini and illustrated
by Jack E. Davis
Variety of books showing caricatures of people.
Dynasty /FM Brush Eye of the Tiger Brushes:
Oval: #6
Flats: #10, #12, ¾”
Project Requirements:
- This project allows the student to explore
the elements and principles of design while being introduced to self
portraiture.
- The students will begin to understand how
to convey character, personality, and expression into their artwork
through the use of exaggerated expressions.
- By utilizing a variety of media this
becomes a multi-media approach.
Project Introduction:
Read aloud Bed Head by Margie Palatini and
illustrated by Jack E. Davis. This humorous look at a child’s morning
routine gone awry always elicits a humorous response from the children
and what is more infectious than a child’s laughter. Discuss the
illustrations found in the story emphasizing the expressions of the
characters and how that combined with the story itself lends itself to
a hilarious look at something that impacts each and every one of us on
a daily basis. That makes it such a great jumping off point for a
child because they can empathize with Oliver, the character in the
story. Have the students close their eyes and imagine the very worst
bed head either they have had themselves or have seen.
Art Production:
- The students begin the project by tracing
around the 9.5”X6.25” oval tracing pattern to achieve a uniform size
and shape for our bed head portraits. An integral part of this
lesson is to teach the children that faces, even though each of us
is different, have general characteristics that lend themselves to
proportion. We divide the oval faces into quarters and draw the
facial features making sure to discuss that eyes do not sit up on
their foreheads, noses can be portrayed in a variety of ways to
represent the personality of the character, and the mouth should
show shock at looking into the mirror and seeing the worst bed head
imaginable. At this time students generally want to add words and
sounds coming out of their mouths as are portrayed in the book. This
will become our rough draft of the project and will allow the
children to develop the face with a plan in mind.
- The students are required to trace another
oval face on a separate clean piece of paper and to add a neck and
shirt to the face. The students then paint the face, neck, and ears
with skin toned tempera paint. It may be necessary to discuss
differences in skin tone and to mix the paint differently for each
child since these are meant to be self portraits depending upon each
child’s skin tone.
- After these are dry the children will
sketch lightly the facial features onto the face and outline the
facial features with a permanent marker. After this is complete it
is necessary to discuss that each of us is different with different
hair and eye color and to discuss that it is necessary to keep part
of the eyes white as that is what happens in nature. Using oil
pastels the children will add the details to the face by coloring in
the eyes, mouth, cheeks, and eyebrows. I also encourage them to
lightly blend the cheeks into the rest of the face so that they
don’t resemble a clown. I also like to show them how to add shadows
and highlight to the faces as some children are actually ready for
this skill and those that aren’t try it anyway. By teaching the
students to use a light hand and carefully blending the shadows and
highlights around their faces they are amazed by the incredible
results that they can achieve and feel such a sense of
accomplishment.
- The bed head portion of this project is
the part that the children enjoy the most, they love adding wild and
crazy hair styles to their heads including everything from Mohawks
to wild and crazy curls. I encourage them to be creative but also
teach that hair is attached to the head and that we all have hair on
our foreheads even when hair is cut very short. We also discuss
color as it relates to hair and emphasize that hair usually has a
variety of tonal values naturally and we can mimic this by using a
light value, a medium value, and a dark value based on their
personal hair color. They love helping me discover what colors
should be used to represent their personal hair color, using those
three values we color the hair making sure to discuss shadows and
highlights in the hair.
- After we have completed the portraits it
is time to paint the background so that they become the most
important thing in the picture and we accomplish this by painting
the remaining backgrounds with one color of the student’s choice of
watercolor paints. I stress that this is necessary because we don’t
want to make our portraits so busy that our audience doesn’t focus
in on our portraits, we want our bed heads to become the primary
focus of this project.
- Every year that I complete this project
with my students I find that in our end of the year evaluation of
projects presented each year this is one of the student’s favorites.
Evaluation: Teacher observation, record
keeping, peer evaluation.
© Christy Hartman 2007
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