Picasso Art Projects for Elementary Art

After discussing Pablo Picasso and his Cubist style, we quickly get on to drawing our own.

Each student gets a copy of my roll a Picasso game. It makes the process of designing their portraits easier and quicker. And even though they’re all using the same worksheet, each project comes out completely different!

So after rolling the dice to pick parts of the face, my students draw each facial feature onto its own smalls crap of colored construction paper.

I have on important guideline which is making sure they draw the features large enough to color. And generally-speaking, they’ll be coloring over most of the paper anyways. So erasing marks usually don’t matter too much.

Then they move onto using oil pastels.

If they didn’t follow my instructions on drawing large eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, they’ll quickly discover on their own why this is important.

It’s because they’ll be working with oil pastels which can be difficult to maneuver into small areas.

I encourage them to fill in shapes first and add outlines, patterns, strokes, and details last. That way, any coloring mistakes can be covered over by the outlines.

I also expect them to be creative with their color choices. It’s abstract art, after all.

Once they’ve designed all their facial features, they move onto drawing a head and hair.

For the head, I instruct them to break up the face into several areas. From here, they can color or design those areas how they choose.

While they’re doing this, they’re overlapping their facial features on top to see how they look against the head. I emphasize that contract is the key to making the eyes, nose, mouths, and ears stand out.

It’s at this time they’re planning out their hair. This may be my favorite part because the more wacky and wild, the more they stand out uniquely.

In some cases, the hair is glued on the backside of the head. In some cases, the hair is intertwined with the facial features.

Completed Elementary Art Picasso Projects

I love how they turned out! Each is so expressive and creative. I can really see each student’s personality in their Picasso project.

• Small facial features meant harder sized shapes to paint
• Not using blending or blocking so their work looked plain
• Painting the black lines before painting the shapes around them so that the end results were sloppy
• Not pre-visualizing the final piece of art and how to make colors balance one another more
• Random, weird color combinations that didn’t make color sense
• Painting over cardboard leads to more muted colors which is not always desirable

After trying this lesson the first time, here are some changes I made for greater success:

• Had students draw all their facial features on scrap paper first for practice
• Painted the face first before all the facial features to gain confidence in their painting abilities; painting a much larger space and getting the practice there first helped
• Incorporated patterns to encourage more creativity.
• Practiced painting thin lines on scrap paper first.
• Used a more defined color palette as Picasso did in his works
• Paint the background of each facial feature shape lightly first, then draw and paint the facial features on top