Crayon Rubbing Self-Portrait–Seventh Grade
When you’re teaching middle school, believe me, the last thing your seventh-graders want you to do is to set up mirrors at their desks. And the horror they feel when they hear that they’re going to be drawing themselves? Unmatched. However, even with all the moaning and groaning and complaining in the world, I still think portraiture is not only important, but necessary to teach! In this lesson, we go over the basics: proportion of facial features, drawing with a light hand, and making sure we are using our observational skills by looking in the mirrors while drawing as often as possible. After sitting down with the students and demonstrating these techniques, I let them loose on their own drawings. Once they’re finished, we do something a little more fun than a traditional self-portrait…we use black glue!
Blick Black Glue once ruined my favorite jacket…after properly warning my students about this horrible creation of science, we squeeze out a layer of glue onto the lines of our self-portrait. The glue is thick enough that even after it dries, it has a nice raised surface that we can use for the last part of this lesson: a crayon rubbing.
After letting the glue dry overnight, we tape down a new piece of paper over our first drawing to complete our crayon rubbing. You can watch my demonstration below! (I only completed half of the face to save time, but the students in my classroom complete their entire faces.)
Not only is the process of creating this self-portrait fun and unique, it’s very forgiving. If a student “messes up” or doesn’t like how they started coloring, they can get as many tries as they want! They would just need to make a new rubbing from their black glue paper.
Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take pictures of any student work for this project! I’m excited to teach this again as soon as I can–we all had a lot of fun with it!
