Day One - Looking at Self-portraits

One of the great things about home-education in the absence of time restrictions. In the pilot classroom this activity was squashed into about 40 minutes before break, at home we got to spend about two hours until interest waned. Spend as little or as long as you like at this, it's really an introduction to the whole idea of self-portraits, but can grow to include more about the artists lives, what was going on in the world and in our case how many different hats has Rembrandt got? We also had lots of fun with www.picassohead.com
I asked Maria if she would like to give her opinion on day one, but all she will say is that she liked it all.

The original scheme had Assessment for Learning (AfL) techniques built in which is about sharing the learning goals with children and giving them an active role in assessing their own work, which is shown to increase creativity as it eliminates the social comparisons which often go along with assessment in the classroom. Obviously there is no need to keep records of assessment as you work through the project at home, but I'll share some of what we are learning anyway for anyone who wants to keep track:
* Identify a self-portrait
* See how they sometimes change their ideas about themselves over time
* Come up with some reasons for this
* Choose a drawing media to draw yourself

The first self-portraits we looked at were two by Rembrandt dated 1630 and 1660:

We talked about these questions:
Rembrandt made over 90 self-portraits during his life. Why do you think he did this?
Rembrandt's self-image changed very little in 30 years, why do you think this is?
What differences can you notice?
What do you think of the colours he used?

Then we looked at this website: www.rembrandtpainting.net and clicked on the link about self-portraits found out a bit more about why he painted so many and then looked at a few more like self-portrait with tossed hair or brimmed hat etc.

Next we looked at lots of Van Gogh self-portraits and found out that most of his were painted over the space of three years. www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/selfportrait.html has lots of info on why this is including quotes from some of his letters and a cool YouTube video clip that shows lots of them morphing into each other. We also looked at some more Van Gogh paintings on Google Art Project, which lets you take a virtual tour of art museums and zoom right in on the details of the paintings. Have a look at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam here: www.googleartproject.com/collection/van-gogh-museum/museumview/

Questions we discussed about Van Gogh:
Van Gogh also painted many self-portraits. Why do you think he did this?
What differences can you notice?
What do you think of the colours he used?
Can you notice the texture created by his brush strokes?

We looked at four very different Dali self-portraits from 1919, 1923, 1941 and 1972.

Dali's self-image and style changed a lot overtime. Why do you think this is?
Look at the dates and think about what else was going on in the world at the time, do you think this is connected to it?
Which one do you like best/least? Why?
More Dali paintings on www.virtualdali.com

The last two self-portraits we looked at were by Leonardo daVinci and Picasso:

We compared the styles, colours, lines used etc. and noted the differences then asked
Do you think Leonardo actually looked like that? What about Picasso?
Why do you think Picasso chose this style?

Finally draw your own self portrait in your favourite media (pencil, pen, paint, collage, pastel, crayon etc.)

Some general questions to ask after this:

What have you learnt about why artists create self-portraits?
Have you new ideas for how to create yours?
What connections can you make with your own work?
Here are some websites we didn't get time to look at today, but plan to later:
www.mos.org/leonardo/
www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/studio
www.picasso.com

Here's a link to one of Maria's self-portraits: http://www.picassohead.com/?id=29b5e53