Grade 4 Picasso face paper collage

I am currently sitting at Aquapulse, the new aquatic centre in Hoppers Crossing, Victoria, typing this blog post. My 12 year old daughter Georgie and her friend Natalie are screaming down the giant waterslide as I type! I am sitting high up in the tiered seating area looking ridiculous, all rugged up for winter, with my laptop on my knee, while everyone else is strutting around in their bathersI This is all rather weird but such are the weekend pursuits of a hard working Primary Art Teacher!!! Multi tasking is my middle name!!!

aquapulse waterslide hoppers crossing victoria Australia

I don’t know what Pablo Picasso himself would think of these face collages below but I just love them.

Pablo Picasso Picture

picasso altar boy

Picasso Mother

First of all I showed the grade 4 students a range of portraits created by Pablo Picasso which I had on my Pinterest board, on the projector. I also had several Picasso portrait prints hanging up in the art room. The students happily discussed how interesting they were and how his portrait style had changed over time. Why do you think Pablo Picasso displaced so many facial features in his portraits? How does this make you feel? What about his use of colour? A portrait is usually a likeness of another person. What does this say about the displacement of the facial features on these portraits? Well done Grade 4s for your fabulous discussions!

Picasso

Picasso Dora Maar

Picasso

We also briefly looked at Weeping Woman as she is very famous in Melbourne as the National Gallery of Victoria owns her and she was stolen from the gallery in 1986. You can read more about that here.

Weeping Woman Picasso National Gallery of Victoria

National Galery of Victoria water wall

Anyway, after looking and discussing I explained to the students that they were going to be creating their own Picasso style collage. In the past I had done this activity with grade 4 and just got them to draw a Picasso-ish face and I had also done this activity using cut out facial features from magazines. Both times before the students had stated that drawing or putting the facial features into the wrong positions was extremely difficult to do.

Zart Art Face Pack Paper

This year I had discovered this paper on the Zart Art website and knew it would be perfect for this activity.

Grade 4 Picasso simple collage 2015 1

Grade 4 Picasso simple collage 2015 2

So the procedure was

Collect A4 cartridge paper from the resource table.
Draw a head and neck on the A4 paper nice and large. (What do we say – FILL THE SPACE!)
Colour the face using oil pastels. Natural skin tones were optional and up to the individual artist.
Select and cut out desired facial features carefully from Zart Art sheets (that had already been trimmed down into quarter of their A3 size – hey, I’m not silly! And don’t massacre twenty seven eyes just to get to the one you want in the middle of the sheet. Cut out carefully and place leftovers from sheet you are cutting back into the EYES plastic pocket so somebody else can use them! Yes, sometimes the instructions have to be this basic to protect the expensive materials!)
How many facial features can you have? How many do you need? Why? “I want more than one mouth because my person talks a lot!” “I need to give my person 5 ears ’cause they always listen to gossip!”
Glue your facial features into their displaced positions.
Is your person bald? What are you going to do about hair?
Cut out your person carefully and mount them on an A4 piece of coloured cover paper.

Grade 4 Picasso simple collage 2015 3

Grade 4 Picasso simple collage 2015 6

Most of the grade 4 students are now working on their next collage which is again based on Picasso’s portraits but A3 size, incorporating different types of cardboard to create (hopefully) layered facial features! I will write up a blog post on these when they are done.