Face Math

Tumbling out of pupil and iris studies straight to the math of the face. Exploring the face is first a hands-on experience. The children touch and feel their way through their facial features, working in pairs.

Using a pencil and a mirror to help find the edge of the mouth

To begin, the children use their fingers to find the tops of their ears, tracing along their cheek bones to their eyes while a friend holds a mirror for them. Then the find the bottom of their ears to their nostrils. They feel the ridge of their noses, the tips, and their chin. They find their pupil and with a pencil positioned over their pupil they find the edge of their mouths. Smile and yawn. How does that change the measurements?

Iris Studies. Using a mirror, pre-cut circles and various shades of
paint, the children hand mix their eye color

Next they sketch, using the pencils, and measure again, keeping the mirror close at hand.

Moving on to painting the features on the face. They begin with the whites for the eyes and then to the mouth and nostrils. These are markers for the shading. The color of the lips is their handmade skin shades with added pink. These three features serve as anchors for the rest of the facial features. They begin at the top, adding their handmade iris colors and pupils, choosing a daylight or a nighttime pupil. Then, they add shading, again using their skin colors mixed with a deeper shade for the ridges of their noses.

Sketch to Painting

No one was more surprised than me when I saw more than a handful of children's permanent marker drawings stretch and grow from 18"x8" sketches to 60"x18" paintings.

I knew that they would all come up with something creative and that they would make a connection based on the experience. That was a certainty, but I didn't know there could be a visual connection -- painted lines and shapes that could be traced back to the original line drawings!  The joy of working with very young children is that they are open to new ideas and will take any meager idea I might come up with and make it SOAR in directions I could never imagine.

So even if they don't look all the same from sketch-to-paint  (one young painter told me, "I never draw the same line twice.") every single one is totally and completely cool.

So this is the next step in our final project for Sense of Place. These were painted on Monday. During our next art session we will take a look at complementary colors and color mixing (creating color wheels) before revisiting these paintings for the next layer.