Over the course of my research for this phase I have collected a set of portraits representing different styles and using different media. We have looked at some of them in previous sessions but today the children’s first task was to find all of the images that showed a profile. This was the cause of controversy as different children recognised different images as profile portraits and so we discussed the key things that designated a profile image. There were a few tricky ones -e.g. one image contained both full face and profile. There was a lot of thought about the media and about what images appealed to the children as well. This has opened up lots of other ideas about how we can be inspired for future work. We even tried creating one of the Carravaggio poses. Quite a dramatic posture.

The morning continued with some profile drawing in chalk on black card. Whether it was the unfamiliar background colour or the medium itself that the children enjoyed, I’m not sure but the work that they produced was full of detail and spontaneous shading broke out unexpectedly. It seemed as if the class had been inspired by the work that they had been looking at and ideas and possibilities had been absorbed.

Continuing with the inspiration, the next adventure was to make a pencil drawing inspired by Eddie Rafferty’s print. The results were really strong and individual pieces of artwork. Lots of detail and delicate mark-making were visible and the children were confident enough to shade and smudge with the pencil. We were all very excited by the results and looked at everyone’s work.

We pushed on even further by experimenting with composition. Inspired by the Eye of Lotte image, the children took turns to draw each other with a similar cropped composition. Not an easy ask, admittedly. There was less confidence in shading and the children seemed to be a bit more inhibited than in the previous exercise but some of the results were still fantastic. It’s great to push beyond conventional framing and look at other ways of composing images. Some of the children thought that they might like to try drawing people with different facial expressions. So many possibilities are opening up for our precious remaining weeks.