Oil Pastel Self Portraits and Poetry
The fun and unique thing about oil pastel self portraits and poetry is the variety of lessons students will get the opportunity to learn. You may also encounter something similar with students as I did. Since some of them were not ready for building the color with oil pastels, this was differentiated by media. I’ll talk more about this toward the end of the post.
Lessons Learned from Using Oil Pastels
From a teaching perspective, oil pastels are an all-around great material for exploring and learning. For younger students, they are typically introduced as an alternative to using crayons. Although oil pastels aren’t used as much in secondary art classrooms, I do suggest that you try to incorporate them more in art projects.
Looking at them as a painting medium (instead of just a drawing material), there are several things your students can learn:
color mixing
reproducing another art
form and value
These are just a few techniques, but they certainly come in handy with this art project.
Oil Pastel Self Portraits and Poetry: A Beginning of the Year Lesson
Before getting started with this project, I had my students practice being precise with the oil pastels. They did this on another sheet of paper beforehand. They had to build up the color in order to create the patterns. If they put just a little pink in a stripe, for instance, they'd have to blend it carefully then add more.
Oil pastels are usually blunt-ended. So, to get the bolder pigments the media had to be layered.
Since I was using this as a new school year starter project, I had the students write acrostic poems with their names. This was a great way for them to get to know each other while being creative at the same time.
I wanted my students to have a go with self-portraits so I had them start by drawing portraits with a pencil. Then, they traced their lines with a permanent black marker. We used oil pastels to add color.
The tricky part of this is getting the students to keep their colors separated. It is the perfect opportunity to teach students that sometimes we work from light to dark and sometimes we work from dark to light depending on the media and the goal.
For this lesson, we worked dark to light to avoid getting the dark colors on the lighter spaces, especially the faces. Another tricky part is getting students to create patterns with oil pastels.
Differentiated Media
Earlier I mentioned this method was a little hard for some students. Since some of them were not ready for building colors with pastels, I used media differentiation. Students who needed to work with crayons first were allowed to do so. The content of a crayon is easier to control than the oil pastel. The pigment doesn't spread as much around the paper. This is a great way to differentiate by media.
Visual Arts Standards
There were three specific visual arts standards I wanted to highlight with this project:
Know the differences between a variety of media and processes and use them to create works of art that communicate ideas. (CP, 1)
Develop perceptual skills and use visual arts vocabulary while creating and studying works of art. (CA, 4)
Recognize that visual arts concepts and skills are integrated with knowledge in other subject areas for use in everyday life. (C, 11)
This is a project I highly recommend trying in your classroom, especially at the beginning of the school year.
Below, I’ve curated some products mentioned in this post. Here’s why I prefer these for this project:
Cray Pas Oil Pastels - Affordable, strong pigment, come in a variety of colors
Crayola Construction Paper Crayons - strong pigment for working on all kinds of paper (including black construction paper), buildable in a similar way to oil pastels (but cannot be smudged/smeared) which creates a lot of variety in the colors, last forever
Black Sharpies - last a long time if you teach students to care for the felt tip of the marker and put the cap back on, darkest black markers out there, don’t smear
Check these products out on Amazon! If you haven’t used these before, definitely give them a try!
