Dazzling acrylic portraits - Acrylic

Arts & Activities, April, 2004 by Len Mathes

I am always attempting to challenge my advanced art students to creative new ways of dealing with traditional subject matter: in this case, the portrait. We delve extensively into the master portrait artists and their individual techniques, which make their portraits so memorable. The journey we take is fun, varied and enlightening. I particularly like to highlight Rembrandt, de Kooning, Cassatt, Sergeant and Warhol.

As many high school art teachers realize, art classes always include students who are not necessarily "art majors," but who find themselves in art for a variety of reasons. Art teachers, therefore, often need to customize their curriculum to meet a wide array of student-artistic demands and create projects whereby each student achieves a high level of accomplishment. This project does that, plus a lot more--guaranteed!

This project is the final culmination of a prior project (Arts & Activities, November 2000, Silk Screen a la Andy). My school was awarded a Digital High School Grant a few years ago, allowing each student and teacher greater access to computer training and knowledge of computer application relevant Io our varied curriculum. I give all my students basic training in the use of Adobe[R] PhotoShop[R], and for this project, some basic "painting" techniques are used merely as an aid.

Students begin with either a posed self-portrait taken on a digital camera, a regular portrait photograph or even a magazine photograph of a favorite celebrity. The only requirement when selecting a suitable portrait for this technique is to make sure there is a high contrast in your subject matter. If there isn't, there soon will be a colored photograph can always be used, but it eventually will be reduced to black and white.

If students use a portrait other than one from digital cameras, they need to use a scanner to scan their picture in order to process to the next step. Using Adobe PhotoShop (or any other photo-enhancing program) the selected portrait is reduced to strictly a black-and-white (line art) rendering. The black-and-white rendering is roughly reduced to about 3" x 5" and printed out on an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of white paper, and becomes the first part of this lesson. I then take this image and copy it onto a transparency sheet. This transparency will be used to project the portrait onto an 18" x 24" piece of Masonite[R] or canvas board using an overhead projector. I tell my students to trace the "black shape," and try to forget you are drawing "a face." That way I am assured they will draw what they "see" and not what they think a face should look like.

For the second part of this process, the student works with the black and white rendering of their face. They use the wide variety of gradient tools available within their computer pro gram to color in the white (or black or both) areas of their portrait. Their use of colors and textures is limitless. They continually ask me "can I do ...?" or "what if I do ...?" or "is it okay to ...?" to which I always reply "you can do whatever you want!" I stress individuality and creativity.

This phase of the lesson seems to be the most time-consuming. Students will ponder long and hard how to enhance their portraits. Once they are at a color scheme they enjoy, I reassure them they are not "married" to this final rendering and may at any time make changes they feel are necessary. Their colored rendering is only a "suggestion" to themselves. The students then print out their colored portraits using a color computer printer and use these as starting points in the final phase of this lesson.

Using their colored printout as a rough "road map" they proceed to render their portrait using acrylic paint. I suggest they paint in the colored areas first, then paint the darker areas last. The acrylic paint is usually transparent enough to allow them to see their original portrait drawing underneath. If they do obliterate their original drawing during painting, they may refer back to the black and white sample or simply project their transparency onto their canvas and retrace any missing parts of their portrait.

Once the portrait is painted to the student's satisfaction, there is yet one final process. Using a variety of print markers, students may elect to further enhance their portraits by using these markers to add texture, patterns or simple lines to outline colored shapes. Since the color schemes are usually very colorful, I suggest to my students to use equally colorful lines, and to emphasize their painted shapes--using complementary colored lines. The effects are dazzling, and each student is dazzled with their results.

The project is concluded by a class room critique whereby each student participates in discussing such topics as new vocabulary and techniques learned, what mental processes were used throughout the project (metacognition), which historical artists can he related to which student project, which works of art they feel are the most successful, and which pieces they feel best expresses the personality of the artist.