How About A Cubist Collage Portrait?

How about some Cubism for your 3rd graders?
You get  to introduce Pablo Picasso to the kids. Bring in the multi- cultural background of African masks, which influenced Picasso's style. That led to him becoming an innovator in the whole Cubist movement. And you also get to bring in some math vocabulary by introducing geometric shapes. That's a 3 for 1 - in one art lesson! Yea, for that!

After viewing a Keynote presentation about Picasso and his art style, we start out drawing the head and neck for the portrait. They use peach colored manila paper (I have loads of it) to draw on. If the kids want darker skin, they can color in the peach paper with crayons or colored pencil.

During the second class, we have a review of the differences between organic and geometric shapes. The kids then get to chose colors out of a scrap box to cut out geometric shapes for their facial features.

The features are drawn on  to the geometric shapes with pencil. Afterwards they use Sharpie to trace over the pencil drawing. This makes the features really stand out!

The kids then can color in the hair, shirt and other items that need to be colored in. And glue everything down.

The last thing the kids do is to cut out the portraits. We then glue them onto background paper.

What do you think of our Cubist portraits? Would they work in your art class? You can comment below!