drawing the face.

this monday i had my drawing and painting students studying facial features. they've been learning to draw the figure for the past two weeks and i thought this was the logical next step. my goal when teaching students in 9th and 10th grade is to give them the skills they need to tell visual stories about their lives and without faces a teenager just can't do that. their lives are all about faces (and bodies i guess).

i find that teenagers often draw the face as if the features were stickers, flat and with no relationship to the actual face, so i decided to have them do each feature separately in their sketchbook. we talked in depth about the structure of each element of the face so they would better understand why the eye is shaped like it is....flaps of skin wrapped around the sphere of the eyeball, or pieces of cartilage sticking out from the cheek. i don't think they really think about that stuff. they're so concerned with the way people look they don't even think about why things are the way they are on the face.

i don't have my students do traditional self-portrait in any of my classes. i know this unusual. self-portraits are usually the center of the high-school art curriculum. some students choose to do them as an answer to some of the assignments i give but i don't ever require it. i'm not convinced that teenagers are objectively capable of looking at themselves in the mirror and recording what they look like...and i don't feel terribly inclined to push them to do so. isn't it more important to give them the skills of observation and drawing that will enable them to do so when they're emotionally ready? i prefer to spend class time challenging the way they see themselves as individuals in the world by asking them to create symbolic self-portraits or family portraits.