Estimated Time to Complete: 1 week (5 class periods)

Materials Needed:

• Tempera Paints (White, Black, Red, Yellow, Blue, etc.)
• Brushes
• Tag board or Mat Board 9" x 9"
• Water Containers (for washing out brushes)
• Paper Towels (for blotting out brushes)
• Digital camera & computer (needs to have Adobe Photoshop 7.0 installed on it) & printer
• Pencil

Directions:

Step 1.  Using a digital camera work with another student to take a digital self-portrait.  Take the 3 ½ floppy disk to a computer, and adjusted the quality to show a wide range of values from light to dark using Paint Shop Pro 8. Then use the  posterize filter and adjust  the image  in order to reduce the number of values in the image to seven. Be sure to also resize the image so that it will be nearly as large as the 8 1/2” x 11” paper it will be printed on.  Once you have done that then print out the image of your resulting portrait.

Step 2. First, you will cut out your face from the photograph carefully and lightly tape it to a piece of mat  board. The outline of the face will traced onto the mat board.

Step 3. Use a piece of tracing paper to overlap the photograph of your face and trace it carefully, taking care to make sure you outline the various values.  (For ease of tracing, you can either use the window as a light source, or use the light table in the back.)  Then you will need to flip the tracing paper over and retrace your outlines to place graphite on the back side of the paper. Make sure you PRESS FIRMLY TO ENSURE THAT THE GRAPHITE IS APPLIED HEAVILY on the back.  Next, flip the paper back over and tape it down on the mat board.  Make sure you get the image centered well, and retrace the lines one more time.  This time you are pressing graphite onto the mat board. 

Step 4.  Using the printout as a guide, paint in the shapes that are white and black from the photograph using tempera paint.

Step 5. Then chose a hue and paint the shapes corresponding to the middle value with that hue.  You will be mixing various shades and tints of that one hue using black OR white.

Step 6. Next, mix white with the hue to create a light value and black to create a dark value. These mixtures will be painted into the corresponding shapes for these values.

Step 7.  Once you have the portrait completed, you should also consider painting the background a tone.  You may choose to paint it in a variance of the monochromatic scheme, OR to choose the complimentary color of the hue you chose for the background.  (i.e., if the portrait is green then the background would be red.  Complimentary colors are the colors that are opposite of each other on the color wheel.)