Description of the Unit – To celebrate Halloween, students chose a famous painting featuring any kind of portrait, such as one of Vincent van Gogh’s or Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. They recreated the painting onto posterboard, cutting out the area with the face so that they could ultimately “wear” the painting as a Halloween costume!
Activity statement – I love Halloween. No, really, I LOVE Halloween, so I try to find any opportunity I can to celebrate it, even with my students. Back during the darkest time of the pandemic, when Halloween was effectively cancelled, I was trying to find ways to still enjoy the season. At the same time, I came upon some images online of adults who had recreated famous paintings as costumes, and it gave me the idea of doing the same with my middle school students as an elective offering. Therefore, this class included both 8th and 7th grade students.
We observed several different paintings of portraits, such as those I mentioned above, but also Andy Warhol’s famous painting of Marilyn Monroe, Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and of course the Mona Lisa. We discussed how each painting could be reproduced. For example, for any of van Gogh’s paintings, the students felt that oil pastels would be best to represent the thick brushstrokes and pure use of color. For Matisse’s painting, students felt that chalk pastels, with their ability to be softened into a smooth texture while remaining vibrant, would be a good choice.
Once they chose which portrait to recreate, I gave each student a color reference, and they set to work trying to size the image so that their own face would fit proportionally into it. Ultimately the idea was to have students then make up their faces to match the coloring on the faces of the subjects of the paintings.
As students were still working on these posters on the last day of the class, (we never have enough time during an elective), I didn’t get to capture them in full makeup, but was able to capture them at least “wearing” their almost finished costumes.
Goals – Students should…
Understand:
- The identifiable characteristics inherent in an artist’s style of painting, such as texture, use of color, realism vs. abstraction, etc.
Know:
- What to expect of certain media, meaning, how media behaves, and what kind of media to use when seeking to express specific characteristics.
Be able to:
- Choose the appropriate media to reproduce the colors, textures and representational characteristics of a given painting.
Resources and materials –
- Examples of a wide variety of famous portraits
- Acrylic and/or tempera paint
- Paint brushes
- Oil pastels
- Chalk pastels
- Colored pencils
- 22”x28” poster board
- Scissors
Questions –
- What media would you use to recreate (X) painting? Why?
- What do you need to consider when attempting to recreate a painting? Explain.
Evaluation – Did students:
- Choose the appropriate media for their recreation?
- Did students manipulate the materials effectively so as to make their reproduction recognizable and similar to the original?
Informal:
- Student questions
- Group discussions
- Oral responses to essential questions
- Elaboration and risk-taking
- One finished “costume”
In the K-8 Art Studio with Anita Sagastegui 