Feast your eyes on the distorted realities of optical illusions that transform the portraits of everyday 8th-graders into fragmented lines and patterns!
Drawing portraits is a fundamental skill that can be improved over time. Most people believe that they can't draw but with instruction and lots of practice, we can learn how to overcome insecurities and rely on visual perception skills.
When we began the portrait unit, there were students jumping up and down with excitement alongside a chorus of groans from their peers. Portraits are TOUGH! Especially when drawing someone you know well or even worse, yourself. My 8th Grade students got to experience both live model portraiture and gridding a printed photo to learn how to draw accurate proportions.
The human face is very mathematical and can be divided into sections. Students practiced these proportions before they took their photographs.
Each image was converted into grayscale and filtered in Photoshop to include at least five values. Students traced their photocopies in sharpie marker before flipping the image over and drawing a 1 x 1 inch grid on the back. On the final drawing paper, they lightly sketched another grid in pencil so that they could follow their portrait grid top to bottom like a visual map. Instead of trying to draw an eye without a reference, they could focus on the shapes connecting together in C-4 to replicate on their drawing.
I love beginning with the grid method in middle school classes because it achieves a pretty comparable likeness to the original photo and gives students confidence that they can accomplish this difficult technique!
While my students were taking their time progressing on this unit, we took a break from the main project for a day to collaborate with my HS student who takes Independent Art during their class period with an exercise in live model portraiture. Art at the middle school level is all about exposure and I wanted them to join in this experience!
Most faces, regardless of individual appearances share the same proportions from the distance between the hairline and the bottom edge of the chin divided in three equal parts:
Top 1/3 of the face: From the hair-root line to the eyebrow line
Middle 1/3 of the face: From the eyebrow line to the base of the nose
Bottom 1/3 of the face: From the base of the nose to the bottom of the chin
Drawing realistically is a visual perceptual skill made up of five basic components. Seeing and drawing:
1) Edges (sometimes called “contour drawing”)
2) Spaces (called “negative spaces”)
3) Relationships (called “perspective and proportion”)
4) Light and shadow (called “shading”)
5) Drawing the whole (called the gestalt, the “thing itself,” the essential nature of the observed subject, which emerges spontaneously from the first four component skills)
Practicing these skills trains the eye to see shapes and spaces more accurately to depict them in artwork. This also builds students' critical thinking skills, problem solving, intuition, imagination, and creativity. The 8th graders were REALLY excited to be able to draw from the easles alongside my high school student and asked if we could do another live session soon!
Sketch from live model exercise made by 11th Grade Student taking Independent Art during my middle school classes
As we returned to their final artworks, students began outlining their completed drawings in sharpie marker and erasing their gridlines. Now for the fun part! The final stage of these Trick Eye Portraits was to incorporate optical illusions through conflicting patterns and mark-making values to disguise their self-portraits through line designs.
They used the face-up side of their photocopies to refer to which areas of their photograph had the darkest values while hatching and overlapping lines on their drawings. We drew in pencil first so that lines could be erased before outlining the details in sharpie marker.
The original photo was a good reference point to compare which areas of the face should be darker than others when creating value with lines. Once all areas of dark and light had been completed, the pencil lines underneath were erased!
I am proud of the work and motivation my students put into developing their drawing technique and pushing themselves a little more out of their comfort zone. It takes a lot of practice to draw portraits realistically and it can be difficult to establish confidence when comparing the "likeness" of your self-portrait drawing to a face you know so well.
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