From Portraits to Selfies
Cheeeese!
Many people make a bright smile when someone takes a picture of them. What about you? And what about people in the past? Discover the world of portraits and get inspiration for your own portraits and selfies!
Warm up
Learn
Are portraits able to help us learn a bit more about present and past cultures?
Go through the interactive presentation with your buddy and explore the role and meaning of portraits for the world community!
Dive in 1
Let’s start!
Look at the Expressive Faces on page 5 of the pdf and answer the following questions:
- What are these faces expressing?
- Try to imitate these expressions with your buddy and then try to think how a person might react to them!
Done?
-
What emojis would you use for those different emotions?
Compare your choice and if possible compare how the same emoji looks like on different smartphones or programms.
Dive in 2
Late 1800’s Charles Darwin suggested that facial expressions of emotion are innate and therefore universal (= the same all over).
Late 20th century Paul Ekman confirmed that all seven basic emotions have their own unique and distinctive facial expression.
- Happiness
- Sadness
- Fear
- Disgust
- Anger
- Contempt
- Surprise
Verify it yourself!
How? First, play together: one of you thinks of one of these emotions, makes the related facial expression and the other guesses! Change roles!
Did you guess right? Then play this game with a variety of people, also of different ages and different first languages!
What is the same and what varies?
Create 1
Take a picture of yourselves together and with a program like Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) make different versions of it, for ex. black and white.
Paste your different versions in the same file next to each other and compare them.
What do you notice?
Create 2
Have a good time, making a portrait of each other!
You haven't done anything like this before? It doesn’t matter, just try your best!
See what materials you have at disposal and get inspiration in the presentation (expressive line brush/line string/line wire/colour…).
Done?
Then exchange about
- the difficulties you had doing it
- what you like about the portrait your buddy made of you
and have your artwork uploaded onto the work.it area!
Reflect
Selfies are self-portraits.
Exchange with your buddy your experience with selfies and then discuss the image of yourself you’d like to represent and how you could do it.
Done?
Then make a postcard on how portraits have changed over time and how they are different in different places.
Download the free KIDS4ALLL app and your wish comes true!
