Sign Language Self Portraits

This is a project that I came up with a couple years ago and have had great success with.  I have only done it with sixth graders and it does take a long time to complete, but I was very happy with the results.  I suggest giving this one a whirl if you want a long lasting project with some great discussion, drawing, and watercolor painting.

I start this project talking with the students about self portraits.  I ask the students, what is a self portrait? In every class, students responded with "a picture of yourself."  This was perfect to start our discussion.  I ask them if it has to be a picture of yourself, could it be anything else?  What about a picture of your foot?  Or arm?  Does it have to be a painting?  Can it be a drawing or photograph?  This is when it got interesting.  Many students were troubled when asked if it could be a photograph.  I then asked them if a musician could make a self portrait through their music?  I saw light bulbs start going off and the "ah-ha" moments started happening.  Within seconds, students were saying things like "I think a self portrait can be anything about you."  This is the response I was looking for.  We talked and the discussion continued as I began a slide show.  I showed self portraits in the following order Rembrandt, VanGogh, Marc Chagall, M.C. Escher, Chuck Close, and Cameron Gray.  The order of these portraits went from a very traditional portrait in realism and got increasingly abstract and less focused on the actual representation of the face.  The way in which artists began to portray themselves became more and more about the way in which they did as opposed to the resulting portrait...the process over the product.  The students were hooked.  They were quite interested and were curious where our new project was headed.  I explained to them that we were going to make our own self portraits, not based on what we looked like but based on who we are.  We would be focusing on our hands, which are so very important in our art endeavors.  We were going to learn some sign language so that we could use our hands to portray our initials, after all, our given names are a huge part of who we are.  We would then be drawing our hands in the sign language poses for our initials.

In the second class, I gave each student a piece of scrap paper and a sign language alphabet handout.  I told them to pose their non dominant hand as one of their initials and try their best to draw it.  I gave no instruction or help, just wanted them to give it their best try.  Many of them struggled and almost all had draw a hand 1/2 the size of their real hand.  After about 7-8 minutes of this, we talked about how hard it was and I brought them over for a demonstration in which i broke the hand up into more manageable shapes and showed them how to measure things and determine approximate angles using their pencils.  They went back to their tables and tried again.  The second round was much better but many still struggled. I explained to them to just try their best and that next week I would show them an easier "almost cheating" way to draw an amazing hand.

When students came in for the third class they were very excited about this "cheating" way to draw.  I gave a demonstration on how we were going to use special stiff transparencies to "trace" over our hands.  In order to use the transparency easily, you can not simply place it over your hand and draw because it is not a flat surface, so I told the students that we were going to get comfy and relax a little today in art class...everyone got to put their feet up on the table to draw.  I told them not to tell any of the other grades otherwise they would all be super jealous haha.  By putting your feet up on the table while sitting in a chair, you can place your signing hand in your lap between your thighs and rest the transparency on both your legs and on your hand so that it is much more stable.  We then used Visa-Vi transperency markers to carefully "trace" our hand underneath the clear plastic.  I made a big deal about our heads not moving while drawing.  I had students sit in their drawing position and stare at their hand.  I then told them to move their head about 3-4 inches to one side of the other and to notice how much the perspective changed which parts of their hands they could see.  So with statue like stillness, the drawing began, making sure to draw all the creases, folds, scars, fingernails, and details that made their hand their own.  After drawing it out on the transparency, I asked students to look on the sign language alphabet sheet and tell me which hand was the one used to sign.  It is the right hand, but seeing that the majority of my students are right handed they had posed their left hand for the drawing.  I told them not to worry as Mr. Malcore had a way to fix this.  I handed out drawing paper for them to transfer their drawing on to and told all the right handed students that we would simply flip our transparency over to give us a right hand.  Luckily I have a bunch of great windows in my room that we used as tracing tables and the students transferred their hand drawings to their drawing paper. We continued this until all initials were complete.

In the following class, we talked about value and shading.  I gave a demonstration on how to shade a hand with pencil to make it appear three dimensional and more life like.  We talked about how anything that is further from your eye tends to be somewhat darker.  This is especially true when dealing with rounded or contoured shapes and forms like fingers.  The edges of each finger appear slightly darker or more shaded as they angle back around the backside of the finger, thus get further from the eye.  I demonstrated how to blend and how to cross hatch.  I then passed out a sheet with two contour hand drawings on it.  Students were to practice shading on these hands before trying it on their own.  I told them to create a gray scale on the top of the paper first, making their pencil lead as dark as possible and lightening it into the white of the paper.  I told them that a well shaded hand drawing will have the darkest dark, the lightest light, and most shades of gray in between.  Once all of their initials were shaded, we began talking about backgrounds.

For the self portrait backgrounds, I told the students that we were going to watercolor paint some sort of scene or image that told the viewer something about yourself, your personality, or what you like to do.  I left it pretty open so that the kids could turn it into whatever they wanted, after all, it is their self portrait.  I am lucky enough to have a computer for student use in my room which helped students find images and ideas for things to draw.  They drew everything out in pencil first.  I gave a demonstration on watercolor painting and talked about how important planning is to making a good watercolor.  I gave on demonstration on wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet watercolor painting and the students LOVED the wet-on-wet, especially when mixing lots of colors to get the tie dye effect.

Students worked for a few weeks on planning and painting their backgrounds.  Once finished, we cut out the hand drawings and used 3-D O's (little foam mounting risers) to put on the backs of the hands to give them a more 3-D look and fixed them to the backgrounds.  It took a long time to complete but the students were very proud and they turned out great.  Lots of different learning going on here, I highly recommend this one, give it a try and if you have questions please ask.