Large Colorful Selfies

I find it extremely amazing that all of these kids can stop and take constant selfies, but then the second you ask them to draw one of them they have a cow!  You would think a generation like this one who loves to take their own picture (and tons of them) (all of the time, sometimes) would be thrilled with the idea of then drawing one of their favorite shots of themselves.  I don't get it.   All of a sudden they become embarrassed of these selfies, of course they sent the image out to thousands on snapchat and other sites, but to draw it on a large scale scene is mortifying.

  Of course like any good art teacher I tell them to get over it and draw themselves.

For this particular project I have them upload one of their favorite selfies into photoshop and then they have to put it under the cutout filter in the filter gallery.  After they have selected that, I then have them play with the different levels and the intensity of the cuts and all of that until they have a picture that looks like them with a bare minimum of at least 5 layers.  If they had their way they would do as little as possible.  I try to push them farther.

Then I tell them they can go and play with either the hue/saturation options or they can try color balance to see what they would look like if they changed their coloring.  When it comes to the final product I don't care what colors they use, as long as they look good together.

When they finish playing in photoshop I have them print it out and then draw it on an 18x24 sheet of tagboard.  Some of them will grid it and other will freehand it, I have no problem with either method.

Once all of the cutout areas are drawn they they color it in with oil pastels.  We have learned that if you apply baby oil with qtips over oil pastels it fills in the spaces and smoothes out the coloring with less waste on the pastels themselves.

Abbie B.

Remington L.

Sommer B.

Jack G.