🎨 Year 5 Art – Playing with Portraits!

This week in Art, Year 5 became portrait artists as we explored a brilliant question:

How realistic do portraits need to be? 👀🖌️

We began by looking closely at a range of portraits and sharing our favourites. We discovered that artists don’t always try to make a face look exactly like a photograph. Portraits can use unusual colours, shapes and lines to show personality, mood and artistic style.

Next, we put our developing technique skills to work with watercolours. 💧🎨 Starting with the primary colours, we experimented with mixing red, yellow and blue, as well as adding black and different amounts of water. We were amazed by the huge range of skin tones we could create!

We then painted lots of little oval faces, adding simple eyes, noses, mouths, hair and line details. This gave us a chance to experiment without worrying about making every face look perfectly realistic.

Our artist inspiration was Alexej von Jawlensky, whose colourful and expressive portraits showed us just how creative a portrait can be. Inspired by his work, we created four mini portraits of our own, using bold lines, interesting shapes and watercolour paints.

🌟 Our artistic challenge: Can a portrait still look like a face even when the colours and features aren't realistic?

Year 5 certainly gave us plenty to think about! We loved seeing how differently everyone approached the same task – no two portraits were alike.