Warhol Zig Zag portraits

This project was kind of a three-in-one lesson

1. self portrait with pencil
2. color theory
3. Pop Art/optical illusion

I was inspired by projects that I have seen that involve doing two similar but opposite drawings and then slicing them and putting them on accordian-folded paper.

I told the kids about Andy Warhol and his many technicolor portraits of celebrities. I also walked them thru drawing a face. We had already done an eye earlier in the year. The next step was to photocopy their pencil drawing, so they would have identical copies, and also not ruin their nice pencil drawing.

Once they had the two faces, they used colored markers to color the different parts of the face. My goal was to have complimentary colors like green/red hair, blue/orange skin, purple/yellow eyes. Then they had to fold/cut their portraits into 4 vertical strips, and alternate them on a larger piece of paper that could be accordian folded.

Primary Color lesson

In my efforts to give the older kids an expanded art vocabulary, I did an early lesson on color. Notably primary, secondary, complimentary, warm and cool. I put up a color wheel and asked them to name the 6 main colors and gave them an overview that complimentary colors are opposite each other.

For the actual project, I had gained inspiration from this art teacher blog.  I made a sheet of paper with radiating circles and photocopied it for the kids.  Then they traced their hand over this.

This was a brain teaser for many because there were several rules:

• Warm colors (red, orange, yellow) for the hand
• Cool colors (blue, purple, green) for the background
• I wanted them to have a pattern to their color choice so that they did not repeat colors next to each other. This led to some confusion, but if they kept inside the lines it worked okay.
• If a ring in the hand was orange, then the rest of the ring in the background needs to be the compliment: blue, etc.

This led to a certain amount of consternation and confusion, but after some minimal coaching it worked fine. I was really amazed at the level of sophistication that even the first and second graders showed! The results are truly cool!