Mirror Image Portraits

The 5/6 Students at Acacia College completed these stunning portraits as part of their unit on sketching.

Prior to creating the art works, the students spent a number of lessons exploring different parts of the face in isolation, in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of what each feature really looks like. After the students had practised their drawing skills and experimented with the different tones and textures that they could create with different grey lead pencils, they began their individual portrait.

First, each student posed for their photograph which was then photocopied and enlarged to A3 size. Then students were asked to cut the face in half and attempt to copy the tones and textures of the original picture. During the lesson students focused on the techniques of cross hatching, shading and blending in order to generate a drawing that could emulate the original picture. Each artwork took two and a half hours to complete and the enthusiasm shown by
the students is reflected in the quality of work that they produced.

Sarah Morris
(Visual Arts Teacher)
Acacia College
Suitable for Level 4