Self Portraits after M.C. Escher

Seventh graders' self portraits in pencil were inspired by this 1943 portrait of artist M.C. Escher. While Escher is most famous for his tessellation designs, he was talented at drawing. I just love this haunting portrait he did of himself, particularly because of the strong values and contrast between the lit area of his face and those in shadow. For this project, I took a photograph of each student from a 3/4 view, with a spotlight on one side of the face, reminiscent of Escher's pose.

The next step of the project was to use the grid method on the photograph to create a map for drawing the features and outlines of the face. This method helped students to stop drawing symbols of lips, eyes, hair, etc., and actually draw their correctly proportioned and uniquely shaped features. After erasing the grid lines, they meticulously added values (shading) with various graphite pencils to make their portraits appear three dimensional and realistic. As usual, these photos don't really do this work justice... I hope these artists are proud of the work- I sure am!