2nd grade Family Portraits

I’ve wanted to try a family portrait drawing project for a while but it seemed so daunting. Our art classes have drawn Sugar Skulls and Tim Burton self portraits, but haven’t attempted drawing family portraits until this year.

It helped that Nic Hahn created a Teacher Pay Teacher guide to her presentation about elementary family portraits. Her guide helped me teach about facial proportions, how to draw a detailed eye, mouth, nose, etc.

A different guide helped with how to draw hair. Tim Burton Style Self-Portrait Unit by Felice Navi-Art on Teachers Pay Teachers had many hair options. So between both guides, our class had a good starting point for our portraits.

However, there were very few African American hair choices in the guides, so I looked through the internet and copied and pasted several more options to fill in the gaps. So when I combined all 3 guides, we were fully ready to give it a try.

This project took an extremely long time to finish. We had a few interruptions, and a brand new project always takes longer than teaching it after that.

First I made a class set of oval card stock tracers for the heads. I made adult-sized ovals and kid-sized ovals. For teens they just used an adult-sized tracer but placed it slightly lower on the page than the adults.

We looked at Nic Hahn’s family portrait examples and paired and shared to share what we noticed when we looked at them.

Then I demoed how to position different heads and bodies of our family when they’re grouped together. It was common for the students to draw a neck and chest but no arms, so we were on missing arm patrol as we drew.

We looked at our faces and our classmates’ faces to see the facial features in real life. Then I would demo how to draw each feature and they would draw their own.

I think the concept of mentally imagining 1. who’s standing in front, 2. who’s standing behind, and 3. how to draw the front body in full but draw the body behind it only partially was WAAAYYY too abstract. Next year when I teach it again I’m going to group real students together for a quick gesture drawing so they see in real life why you draw the whole person in the front but the person in back is blocked partially by the front person’s body.

Another change I’ll be making next year will be paying closer attention to 1. erasing the plus signs on faces before we get to Sharpies, and 2. erasing the bald scalp line when hair is drawn over it.

Getting the skin tone was a challenge. I ordered the Crayola Skin Tone Colors of the World Skin Tone Markers but all 5 boxes disappointingly arrived dried out. I also ordered Crayola Skin Tone Colors of the World Skin Tone washable paint with better effect. It was a little cakey/smeary on the paper’s surface but was okay overall.