10 Days of Portraiture

9th grade unit, 10-13 days: 

This is a beginner-friendly unit, but it asks a LOT from students. They'll have to struggle and practice to stay afloat. As soon as a student memorizes facial proportions, she can make a face look like a plausible human being. And that's the goal, because capturing likeness doesn't matter—capturing likeness is for pros who've drawn many dozen faces.

Whoever teaches portraiture should expect to be on his feet for this entire unit. I need to move quickly around the tables, checking everyone's proportions. Whoops, that face is too wide, eyes too far apart, mouth too low, forehead too small, lower lip too dark. Double check the angle of the jawline. See how the ear is attached at an angle? You can't see the top of the head in the reference, but let's estimate where it should be.

I start the unit by drilling basic proportions in front view and 3/4 view. Later, I add masterclasses for eyes, nose, lips, and hair. 

Day 1 should stretch into 2, 3, or 4 days when kids need more practice. I split the class into intermediate and beginner (they choose). Intermediate students follow a detailed skull draw-along from a YouTube vid, and beginners work with me. We do draw alongs until they're at a point where they can draw a plausible human being. 

Day 2-3 begins with an eye masterclass, and then students draw a side-lit character from a movie still in pencil (I let them choose from 5 photos)

Day 4-5 begins with a nose masterclass, and then students draw a portrait in 2 tones of ink.

Day 6-7 begins with a lips masterclass, and then students draw a portrait in white chalk.

Day 8-9 is charcoal copy of a Sargent drawing.

Day 10 is a hair masterclass. The exercise forces students to discern subtle values in hair, to not make hair flat. They visualize the hair as a solid mass.

After Day 10, they take self-portrait photos with dramatic side-lighting and draw their own portraits at a large scale. This goes on for 4 weeks. 

I would have LOVED for an opportunity to learn this in grade 9 (or 10, 11, 12—I wasn't taught any portraiture until university).

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Over the first 10 days, beginners are just trying to get eye shape right, get noses in the right position and size. It takes time, practice, and teacher support. Here's what I'm looking for during and especially after the first 10 days:

• Top lip dark and bottom lip light
  
  
  
• Underside (down-plane) of nose is dark (except when lit from below)
  
• Don’t add heavy outlines where you don’t see them (see omitted outline on nose & lips above)
  
  

• Thickness of top eyelid is dark, thickness of bottom is light (except when lit from below)
  
  
  
  
• Hair is not a flat value, is has light and dark patches
• Don't draw eyelashes
  
  
• Separate side and front planes of nose (usually a change in values, or a highlight between the two planes)
• Nose cuts inward right below forehead (see skull below)
• chin-to-nose = nose-to-eyebrows = eyebrows-to-forehead
  

More Sketchup to AI renders

From Sketchup to Dzine.ai

7th grade design lesson:

Turning Sketchup models into Dzine AI renders

7th Graders made the castles above from sketchup models.

Students spent 2-3 days learning sketchup as described in <<this old post>>. Then on Day 4, I showed them how to import their screenshots into Dzine.ai as structure references. The class brainstormed interesting prompt ideas like: "Castle underwater surrounded by coral and sharks" or "Castle next to a volcano, at night with lightning in the sky, a lava river . . ."

Students made these with structure match at 0.8. A few beautiful castles had mid or low structure match levels, but I haven't posted those here.

I suggested everyone start with the ANIME styles, especially Vivid Tableaux.

Above: Emily, Tanay, Alexia

Beyond the Rule of Thirds: A New Paradigm for Grand Compositions

Tactics for 11th and 12th.

This semester, tens of thousands of secondary art teachers gave presentations on good composition. All probably taught students about the rule of thirds and atmospheric perspective. Half probably discussed leading lines, balance, avoiding tangent edges, and the virtues of worm's eye view.

These prescriptions are useful (and I teach some of these principles too—especially unusual camera angles). But if your top students follow all of the above, they'll still only rise to Level 4 or 5 (on 1-to-10, newb-to-pro scale). 

In this post, you'll see another magic bullet that doesn't get talked about: a growth-hack that will lift your best students' art to Level 7 (benefits comparable to learning perspective or artistic anatomy, but this skill's far easier to pick up). You'll hear from Paul Felix, one of the top 15 illustrators living today—he designed San Fransokyo for Big Hero 6. You'll also learn what artists like Kandinsky and Klee did wrong. The new tricks take a minute to learn and yield highly effective paintings.

We'll start by looking at what Aurélie Bouquet, a French illustrator, painted from a reference photo. How did she change the scene she observed? 

She narrowed contrast within the grass, within the trees, and the on the donkey. 

Look what she did to the telephone pole: it almost disappears into the hill behind it. Why did she paint the pole so faintly?

Also, why did she enlarge the mass of trees behind the donkey? The first answer is she wanted to create

Art Lesson: Rectangle of Destiny

 

Lesson for 9th grade, 6 weeks, acrylics or gouache

Above: Kotoko and Maxine develop their paintings, inspired by the styles and colors inside their rectangles. Students did a few days of color mixing exercises at the start of this project. Beyond color mixing, they leveled-up their composition skills and visual storytelling skills during this project.

Art Lesson: Botanical Abstract Paintings

Lesson for 9th or 10th, 5 weeks:

Before they were professionals

Imagine that each high school student stands on a ladder representing their lifetime growth as an artist. But usually, the students can't see what's ahead of them, what potential they have to grow. Why not show them the stories-in-pictures below, so they can see what years of study and practice can accomplish.

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Anthony Avon - from age 16 to 24

Henrik Rosenborg - from age 16 to 26

Art Lesson: Oil Painting from a Grisaille layer

In IBDP, what does a 4 vs 5,6,7 artwork look like?

student work, 7 score

New IB visual arts teachers struggle to accurately score their IAs because they don't know what a 4, 5, 6, and 7 look like. And actually, even veteran IBVA teachers, when they try to become moderators, get turned away all the time because they have a different idea than the master examiner about what a 4 vs a 5,6,7 should look like.

If it's this hard for teachers, imagine how hard it is for new DP1 students. They have NO IDEA, even after studying the rubric, what a 4 vs 5,6,7 looks like. They think: As a 16yo artist, what's expected of me?

To solve this problem, I made this student-facing slideshow. I'm thinking in percentiles: What does a painting characteristic of the 50th versus 70th, 90th, 95th, or 99th percentile look like? How about a photo or a sculpture?

This slideshow has serious limitations, discussed on slide 2, but it works best when a teacher presents and discusses with students. That's because my students (and maybe yours) want to see how good a 6 or 7 must be to reach the 91st or 98th percentiles, respectively.

(And I'm always reminding myself that if 16,000 students take DP Visual Arts in a given year, only about 450 will score 7 on their EX. It's a scary-low number).

In IBDP, what does a 4 vs 5,6,7 CS look like?

Art Lesson: Illustrated Letters

 Lesson for 7th - 10th, 3 weeks:

Inspired by <<Typefight>>, the 3-year-long graphic design tournament. Students design an illustrated letter in the style of one of the nine master artists below:

7th uses only gouache, and I subtract Klimt from their bank of artists to choose.  I give them 75% longer to finish the project (they need more class time). Below, they're practicing mixing colors:

IBVA Showcase

11th-grade IB Visual Arts cohort made these a long time back, but I wasn't allowed to publish these until now (IB rules). Students' only constraint was that they had to choose a limited palette.

Each canvas shown below is VERY LARGE:

Art Lesson: Interiors in Perspective

10th-grade Art Lesson: 

When I was in school, my art classes never taught perspective. Blessing in disguise, because I learned from a wonderful book linked at the bottom of this post. That book took me farther down the rabbit hole than any reasonable kid would go (ex: book got me sketching praying mantises and alligators in perspective). Nothing has increased my breadth as an artist more than leveling up my perspective drawing skills.

One cool thing about teaching perspective: students who do well here are often different from those who do well with the other art lessons I run. But be warned that this is a challenging lesson for all students, and you'll be working closely with each of them to get their paintings across the finish line.

Accommodation for weaker students: They may work in monochromatic watercolor.

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The students are charged with designing an interior for a themed resort hotel (themes = haunted forest theme, cats theme, pirate theme, and so on). 

They have to figure out lighting and how to render their interesting interior objects in perspective, with cast shadows, etc. Top examples:

Laser-cut Islamic Windows

Here's one for advanced, self-motivated 10th or 11th graders. It's tricky—but it's great for a motivated few. I usually offer this as an OPTION for students who want to level-up their Illustrator skills. Aspiring architects or graphic designers opt in.

You need Adobe Illustrator. This program lets you build grids from which you'll make repeating patterns. The student might try making a few islamic patterns like this or this.

Making grids is trickier than it sounds because these aren't rectangular—they often mix different-sized hexagons or octagons.

More than that, the shapes have to be connected like a stencil. When done correctly, the technique produces windows like these:

Ideally, you'll pair a student who wants to learn Adobe Illustrator with one who wants to learn arduinos. Then the arduino student programs the LEDs (perhaps changing colors or intensities) that will sit behind the islamic windows, encased in a wax paper lightbox.

Art Lesson: Inventive Color Painting

 

Here's one for 10th, inspired by Claudia Carr. 

What holds you back from teaching digital painting? (Bonus: A killer first digital lesson)

 

Problem: Your students' digital paintings look flat, cartoony, over-blended. Maybe because you don't like the look of it, you avoid teaching digital art. Big mistake. Your kids need to understand digital art, and they need your support.

Solution: Teach your kids the Joon Ahn Technique to inject texture into their digital art.

2-3 class periods for 10th, 11th, or 12th:

Drawing Trees and Clouds: Best Practices