Chuck Close Inspired Self Portraits

Last year at the NAEA Convention, I had the very exciting opportunity to see contemporary American artist Chuck Close speak. His lecture inspired me to spice up my usual 7th grade portrait project and attempt a painted piece like his. Close has been a leading figure in contemporary art since the early 1970s. He is best known for the monumental faces he has painted in thousands of tiny airbrush bursts, thumbprints, or looping multi-color brushstrokes using an abstract, highly illusionistic and systematical means of creating portraiture. Viewed at a distance, these large-scale pieces are still highly realistic in nature. Close starts with a photo, covers it with a grid, transfers the grid, enlarged to scale, onto the big blank canvas, and then starts in one corner, applying paint to the squares, repeating the process in pass after pass from different angles. He makes no underlying sketch to guide him– just the grid. The ears and eyes and locks of hair appear only as the regions of hue and dark and light incrementally coalesce into shapes. Form and line, too, are discovered.

Seventh graders used a similar process to create their portraits (but on a much smaller scale!). 

First, digital photos of the students were manipulated in Photoshop to reduce the portrait to six values/tones and photos were covered with a grid. Students used the photograph to transfer the outlines of their image onto their canvas, using their grids as a map. Once transferred, students focused solely on the values and subtle shapes present within each individual square, not fretting about the details of facial features. For each value, they mixed three paint colors (18 colors in total) ranging from very light to almost black. Then, the piece was painted square by square until the forms of their faces began to take shape amid the rainbow of colors! Students added the Chuck Close signature circles and shapes within each grid square to add to the abstract feel and to reinforce the values. Though time consuming, these portraits are fanciful and striking, and art students did a fantastic job creating them!

Finished Paintings:



Cool Clocks!

On Fridays in the Middle School, students participate in teacher-led clubs instead of Study Hall. First semester this year, I led an Art Club for 7th and 8th graders and they created these funky working clocks out of foam board. Each clock is three layers and they were decorated using paint pens and acrylic paint. 

Islamic Inspired Clay Tiles

In the Muslim world, every aspect of daily life is considered to be art- furniture, rugs, dishes, fabrics. Muslim artists do not try to imitate nature but concentrate instead on conveying what nature represents. So, almost all Islamic art is made up of complex abstract patterns that create a sense of unending repetition. For Muslims, geometric patterns reflect the language of the universe and all geometric patterns are developed within a circle, the symbol of unity.

Inspired by their recent study of Islam in History/Geography, fifth grade art students began this project by creating a radially symmetrical design on paper. They rolled slabs of damp clay and transferred their designs onto the clay. Clay tools were to carve into the clay in some areas, while extra clay was added to build up other areas in a way that emphasizes the design. 

Later, the tiles were glazed and fired in the kiln.  Here are the beautiful final products!

2nd Quarter Portraits/Tessellations

I am SOOO overdue on blogging, so this is the first of many that I will be catching up on this week. In this “classic” Calvert project, sixth graders first created the backgrounds of their paintings by making tessellations- a special kind of design made from different patterns of repeating shapes called polygons (closed shapes that have three or more sides). In tessellation designs, congruent polygons fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces that repeat again and again- they could go on forever! Students painted their tessellation designs using either a warm or cool color scheme.

To create the portrait, students traced the light and dark areas of their faces using a projected digital photograph. Using the opposite warm or cool color scheme from their background, they painted their portrait, making sure their light and dark areas were highly contrasting: