This portrait is a class activity of St John Baptist De La Salle, the patron saint of teachers.
St John, is the founder of the De La Salle Brothers. The Brothers who worked with the Presentation Sisters founded St John’s Regional College.
Year 8 students in the subject Art created the portrait. The unit of work that they were studying was drawing.
Within the unit they had looked at different ways to create marks on the paper, and explored different media. The media used is pencil, charcoal, ink and Conte. They explored the way the media could be put down and taken off the page.
How To:
The students were all given a small piece of a portrait of St John, that was done by Giovanni Gagliardi. The piece was to scale of an A4 page and measured 2.5cm x 4cm. The students then had to scale the piece up to an A4 page copying every mark, tone and texture. The key was not to use a grid but to do it by eye and using the base mark as a point of reference. The students did not create the individual works as part of the whole, but looked at their own work as an abstract work, that explored scaling and mark making, which then came together to make the final work.
