The Children’s Museum in Greenville, South Carolina recently hosted an art program for kids. One of the programs used our R51449 Face Pads to make gorgeous collage portraits with magazine cutouts. Guest poster Christina Drotor tells us more about the process below!

Christina:

As an artist myself and Program Guide at The Children’s Museum,  I felt it would be fun and informative to learn about artists and their inspirations. So, I introduced our summer campers (ages 6-10) to the art and life of artist Romare Bearden. We had a blast using magazine and scrap paper to create self-portrait collages on the Roylco face pads. We explored images, books, websites and the wonderful jazz music that influenced his art. Everyone created their own masterpiece which reminded me of our mission: To spark a lifelong passion for curiosity and learning through play.

Materials:

• Roylco multicultural face pad paper

• Glue

• Scissors

• Magazines

• Scrap paper

• Wall paper

• 12″x18″ construction paper

Optional:

• Crazy line cutting scissors

• Shape hole punches

• Photographs

• Mirrors

Today we are going to make self-portraits using magazines and other types of paper. This method is called collage, and that was Bearden’s art technique. We will first focus on finding facial features that “match” ours or the way we see ourselves.

Demonstrate how to collage cut or tear magazines to look like hair.

Emphasize that the original image does not have to be of hair, we can use anything, and try to match the natural hair color, so our portraits will have varied textures within.

Demonstrate how to apply glue with a brush-dip brush in, tap off excess, brush onto the desired spot, place brush back in the glue, place paper on the glue, and brush over the paper, to ensure that it is flat and sealed.

Add details, bows, glasses, clothing, other body parts. Emphasize that clothes and accessories do not have to be realistic, in other words, you do not have to look for a picture of a bow to put on your hair–you could use anything, like butterfly wings, or 2 slices of pizza.

Have children share their art with the group and discuss other things they learned about collage.

Thanks to Christina for this awesome post!

Images and original post © Christina Drotor from TCMU Greenville, SC.

This post was not sponsored for a review. At LittleFingersBigArt, our mission is to present to our readers and viewers the newest and most creative craft ideas that fans of Roylco have made on their own. Our goal is to allow you and other educators and parents to reuse our products in fun ways so that children always get the best educational experience from them!

We’d love to see more ideas like this one! If you’ve got a brilliant craft idea or have made a version of one of our crafts that you would like to share with us, send an email to us with photos, descriptions or a link to your work. We will create a feature post and link back to you with full credit. Contact us through the contact form. We’d love to hear from you!