Picasso's Cubism

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist who was known to use a variety of mediums. At the young age of 13, he was already considered a child prodigy in art, surpassing his father who was also an artist. He is considered one of the greatest artists to ever live. He is most well-known for an art style that he founded with Georges Braque called Cubism. Cubism attempted to show all the sides of something at once. Typically this could only be done in sculptures. It is characterized by a broken glass effect, showing more than one point of view at once, and many geometric shapes.

After talking about Picasso with the students, we started off the project by choosing two colors to be our face. Students used a tracer that I had made to trace a head onto each sheet of paper. I had them use a tracer because I thought it would be too hard for them to get the exact same head twice. On one of the heads that they traced, I walked them through drawing a side profile of a face. Picasso commonly showed a face looking at you from straight on, as well as from the side at the same time. Then they cut out one head and the half side profile and glued the side profile onto the head.  Lastly, they cut out a neck and glued that on.
The next day, they cut out shoulders and glued the shoulders and head and neck onto their background. I also showed them how to draw eyes as if looking at you straight on, as well as eyes from the side. Lastly, they drew a mouth and glued that on.
The 3rd day, I showed them how to draw curved rectangles to be the eyebrows. I also showed them how to cut up paper into geometric shapes and then arrange them to form hair. They could also add any other details that might be unique to them such as glasses and freckles.
On the final day, they used a sharpie to outline everything that they had glued on.
These will be displayed at our end of the year art show and I can’t wait to see the parents’ reactions

This guy was super excited about including braces on his self-portrait!