Surrealism and Food Faces with 4th Grade

 When I started my school wide portrait theme I wanted to keep things interesting. Didn't just want to do classic portraits, this project that I stumbled on from Pinterest via this post, was the perfect fit in accomplishing that!

I did change a few things about the lesson. I wanted a little art history focus so I talked about Surrealism including Magritte and Dali and then our inspiration Giuseppe Archimboldo.

Awesome right?!? During my research I read that he inspired many surrealism artists even though this guy was working in the 1500s. Just do a google image/wikipedia search, really incredible stuff! I am also trying to incorporate a little more writing after being inspired to do so at the NAEA conference so I had students write 3 "Dollar" words in response to a surrealism painting. "Dollar" words being words that are worth something, so...descriptive, emotional, phrases that come to mind, just not words like cool and neat. BLEH.

I Can for this project: I CAN create a surrealism portrait using only food.

Day 1: Started off with the PowerPoint right away when they came in. The first image was a Magritte and under the image it said write 3 "Dollar" Words, this was the first time students had done the writing reactions for me so I had to explain what I meant by that. I had them share with each other and then share with me what their partner said. Some answers were silly (obviously, its surrealism!) but others really thought about what they were looking at. Then I shared with them what Surrealism was and we explored more works by Magritte and Dali. I had them raise their hands, and they didn't have to share, just as a visual for me, when they saw what was "wrong" with the image we were looking at, i.e. what made it surrealism. I really put emphases on looking at the titles and using clues from the title (HELLO COMMON CORE!) to get more information about the painting. Finally we moved into our inspiration for the project Mr Giuseppe Archimboldo. They loved this guy.

So COOL! Art history geek in me FREAKING OUT. We did a brainstorming game on a worksheet that we eventually sketched out our project on. I gave them two minutes to write as many foods as they possibly could so they had a word/idea bank while sketching. Then I showed them my example and gave a view pointers/reminders/guidlines. The original lesson I found said only healthy foods but the junk food lover in me didn't want to limit and plus it wasn't a lesson on nutrition! So there! (Collaboration idea for next time though!) Also we talked about how things did not need to be proportional or realistic in size to the other foods being used, that really opened up a lot of opportunities. Ended the day with a basic exit slip asking them if they remembered they type of artwork we were looking at this class. Answer: SURREALISM!

Day 2: Reviewed Surrealism. Started final works. Colored pencil and marker outlining. My cooperating teacher, when I student taught, was big into outlining things in marker and I fell in love with the process. LOVE the way it makes things pop! They could work either coloring then outlining or outlining then coloring. JUST NOT COLORING IN MARKERS. You wouldn't believe how many messed up on that. I wrote it on the white board and made them say it all out loud, they thought it was pretty funny but they all remembered after that! When the face was finished they added foods to the background.

Day 3: Most needed another workday so I used the extension from the original found lesson for students to do after they finished. More on that later ;)

Check them out! I LOVED this project. Some even ended up doing a fully body!

All breakfast!