What Was Before the Selfie?
Get curious
Set off on a tour - hunting for portraits. You can look for portraits at school, or search further afield.
Take photographs or draw sketches of the most interesting portraits you see.
Watch a film featuring an artist who uses modern technology to create portraits. Talk about creating portraits.
What tool does the artist use? What tools were used in the past?
What do these modern instruments give the painter?
What does the artist start from when drawing a portrait of a particular person?
What (objects) does the artist include in the portrait?
Get going
Students guess the identity and occupation of persons depicted on paintings from various times.
Check if you guessed the occupations of the depicted persons correctly.
Students draw a portrait of a ruler on the basis of an oral description.
Compare your portraits of the ruler.
You will see some twentieth century portraits painted by Picasso.
Did Picasso’s contemporaries look like that? Or maybe the artist didn’t know how to paint realistic portraits?
Discuss it with students
Get practicing
Students follow in Picasso’s footsteps and "paint" a Picasso-style portrait.
Each student create a Picasso-style portrait. It can be a portrait of themselves, their family member, a friend or any other person. Students experiment with the Cubist form (geometrization of shapes), and also with colour. Ask your students to cut out figures from papers in different colours. For this purpose you can use the template with figures provided in the panel.
Next you can organize an exhibition of portraits painted by students in the classroom or elsewhere in the school.
