I love, love Georgia O'Keeffe's work. Her flowers are beautiful and we have done some really nice things with them before. However, this year we decided to take her "looking skills" and use them to look at the human face.
We started by drawing faces. I had the students draw "the best human face" they could. They did this at the end of a project or as homework. I collected them and the next time we met, we worked through the rules of drawing a face together.
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| pre and post drawings from several students side by side |
Next we talked about Georgia O'Keeffe and her life. It is hard for my students to understand that "back in the day" women just weren't famous artists. When I tell them that her choices were limited to being a mom or being a school teacher they find that hard to believe. They also struggle to grasp that sharing your artwork wasn't as easy as snapping a picture on your iPhone and hitting send. At the end of the talk we discussed how she really, really looked at things.
I then give them a view finder and a random face. They spent some time creating a composition that HAD to include a major facial feature (eye, nose, mouth)
They drew this out on to a square piece of paper.
We spent some more time looking before we started our color. We really looked for light, medium and dark areas. Finally, each class period was assigned a different medium. One was oil pastel, one watercolor, one tempera and one colored pencils. They turned out pretty cool!
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| oil pastel |
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| colored pencil (they took their's home as homework) |
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| tempera |
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| watercolor |
and you can check out more of them
Artsonia
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