When students arrive in Year 7 our first job is to teach them to draw. Here is my Key Stage 3 (2 years) curriculum outline:
Portraiture
Measurement and perspective
Media and mark-making
A brief history of art
Anatomy
Development of a work
In this blog I briefly describe the teaching of portraiture in our knowledge-rich curriculum.
First, we show the children that their brain lies. This can be really fun. We start by showing some optical illusions and talking the students through them: Which line do you think is longer? Now measure them and see! Do you think these lines are parallel? Use your ruler to find out! We talk about the reasons our brain makes these constructions and about why it is important to be aware of them and watch out for them.
Now for the portraiture – after a fashion. We start off by asking students to do a “before” – a self-portrait in monochrome coloured chalk without having had any instruction in portraiture. These are almost uniformly weak. We spend one lesson on this, and use it as an opportunity to introduce coloured chalk as a medium, looking at the very basics of line and tone. More on the choice of medium below.
After students have completed their “before” self-portrait, we teach the basic proportions of the face, the basic anatomy of the eye, nose and mouth, normal behaviour of light e.g. a darker upper lip, and important areas to focus on such as the corners of the mouth and the amount of the iris visible. We encourage the use of blocks of tone to get away from the conception that faces are made of lines. Coloured chalk is perfect for this because it’s much easier to block than pencil, it’s less messy than charcoal so we don’t need to spend as long teaching how to handle it, and students aren’t overwhelmed by the cognitive load of a fairly tricky medium. And it’s way cheaper than Comte crayon.
Each of these components is taught explicitly by the teacher under the visualiser, modelling a bad one and then a good one. Students are questioned throughout to check for understanding. After each component has been taught, students practise on 3 or 4 exercises. They use a ruler to draw out a face proportions, and then practise from photos of different faces. They copy several drawings of eyes, then photographs, then their own from life. Repeat for noses and mouths. They practice copying very rough tonal drawings of faces using their coloured chalk, then from photographs, then their own from life. These whole-face practices are short 5-minute tonal sketches to engage the students with the shapes of the tone, rather than carefully planned or detailed drawings. During each of these activities, the teacher circulates and corrects misconceptions: “You have missed the shadow under the lip, add that in”; “You cannot see that part of the eye, it is in shadow – go over it please”; “The eyes are not that far up, look again”.
After all of the component parts have been practised in this way, students begin their “after”: their new self-portrait using the same coloured chalk. These are A3 size and are completed over about four lessons. Students begin by constructing the face proportions – at this stage they use the standard ones rather than measuring their own as we don’t teach measurement until a later unit. These proportions are checked by the teacher before students can begin to work on the face. The room is lit dramatically to allow bold tonal shapes to be seen to discourage over-use of line. Students apply their knowledge from all of the practice they have done, and bring it together in a single piece. The results are incredible! The transformation between the “before” and “after” is so impressive, and it shows students a) what they are capable of in terms of rapid improvement and b) why it is so important to study the theory and rules of art in order to be a successful artist. After the final portrait has been completed, students write a reflection on the differences between their first and final efforts, identifying the misconceptions that were present in the initial work and how they worked to overcome them in the final one. This allows us to introduce some critical language and writing conventions as well as encouraging students to be reflective artists and think explicitly about their practice.
Knowledge-Rich Art 