2012: Project 1--Self Portraits

I was pretty excited to get our art history projects under way this summer. I always start off with the same project each year: a self portrait. I've learned over the last couple years that the girls do much better with these projects if they are well rested. I was reminded of this once again as they each had a mini-meltdown during the course of this project. It was a Monday after three days of being up north with my husband. Kind of my fault. I should have planned that a bit better. But oh well. We reviewed the images I showed them last year for art historical self-portraits. And then I showed them a few doodle pages. I told them they could make a portrait with a "real" background or one that was something imaginative.

Despite some of the drama that occurred during the project, they turned out pretty cute. In the future, I might limit the use of the Crayola Slick Stix just because they are so thick and messy and I think my younger daughter's picture would have had a totally different feel if I hadn't let her color the sky and grass with them. But I'm always torn with letting them roll with it and giving them direction.

My six year old's...she's in our backyard and though it's hard to tell below, she even put in some of the pine trees. It was fun, she asked me to help her draw pine trees. So I showed her how to make a trunk and some hash marks for the needles. She was so proud that she could make pine trees that weren't just a triangle or look like Christmas trees.

My eight year old's...she obviously went with the imaginative route for her background. She didn't originally have sunglasses on. But she didn't use a thin enough marker and her eyes ended up looking like she had goth makeup on. She was really upset how they turned out so we "fixed" it by turning them into sunglasses a la "Beautiful Oops". ;-)

I like to do this project each year just to give them the same set of instructions and see what they do with them from year to year. We'll see how our next art history related project goes.....in the meantime, we have been having fun with some liquid watercolors and kool-aid!