Digital LEGO Self-Portraits

I love self-portrait projects! Not only are they great tools for us to explore and experiment with our conceptions of ourselves but they are also good for developing drawing skills too.

For the last few weeks the Grade 4's have been working on a self-portrait project with a fun twist. Each student created an artwork of themselves looking like a Lego Minifigure using oil pastels and paper. Before they began with the artwork, we explored the elements that made up a Lego figure, like round black eyes with a little dot of white, square faces and block shaped bodies. 

The thing I have realised about both drawing and self-portrait projects is that often we don't know how to represent some of the things that we know to be true about ourselves. This is especially true if we don't see these things in the images and art around us. In my classroom, a good example of this is how to draw hair.

 When I first started doing self-portrait projects with my classes I was perplexed to find my students all drawing their hair as block shaped straight hair when so often they chose to wear their hair curly, in braids, or in a range of beautiful hair styles. When I would ask them why they had drawn their hair differently to what it was, the most common answer was that they don't know how to draw braids, or curls or natural hair. On reflection, I realised that so much of the art, images and media that we see shows hair as long, glossy and straight - and easily drawn as a block shape with some lines in it.

Because of this, our class discussion also included observations about the range of colours we could use for Lego skin tone and the different ways that we could use to represent hair so that it looked like Lego hair but was also representative of the hair identity of each artist. Setting students a self-portrait project without offering them a range of tools with which to create an artwork that represents the reality of who they are would be an unhelpful exercise. Without these tools, students are essentially required to contort their artistic representations of self in ways that become alienating to their experience of their authentic selves and their lived reality. 

Once each child had finished their masterpiece, we used an iPad to photograph the work which was then imported it into the DuckDuckMoose Chatterpix Kids app. This app is such fun! Once the artwork is imported, you can draw a line where you want a mouth to be and then record a 30 second audio clip. This turns a photograph into a talking image. The students really enjoyed practicing their impromptu speech skills and giving their self-portrait even more personalisation with the addition of their own voice, thoughts and words.