Activities for the Primary Classroom

1.) To explore how portraiture conveys information about a person. (Art, Literacy, PSHE)

Look at Josef Herman’s paintings The Welsh Miner and In the Canteen. How do you know what these men do for a living?

Look at other images of workers or people at work. How can you tell what their job is?

Discuss the different jobs that children’s family members do, or jobs they see in their local community. How could we make a portrait of these people and show what they do?

For example: a taxi driver could hold keys, or sit in a car; a shopkeeper could be behind a till, or by shelves. Make creative lists of jobs and the various symbols that might represent those professions.

Look at their clothes and helmets

Show how the size of the miner’s hands in the portrait tell us how important they were for his job.

The children could plan and

photograph a portrait of their

chosen family member. Parents/

relatives could make a school visit to

discuss their work. Drawings or

paintings could be made linking a

person with the symbol of their

profession. The finished works could

prompt a guessing game for other

children in the class/school, or as part

of a class assembly.

Resource created by Danielle Heiblum & Edward Dickenson

Activities for the Primary Classroom

2.) To explore the use of collage in portraiture. (Art) Look at Joan Eardley’s images of children and how collage has been used to incorporate pieces of paper such as newspaper clippings and tickets.

What sort of paper would you want to include in a portrait of yourself? Think of local newspapers in the area you live, a report about your favourite sport, a receipt for something you bought or a ticket for film you saw. Discuss and share options.

Experiment with including collage with painting:

You could also experiment with building up a patchwork background of newspaper cuttings, then painting a portrait over the top.

Try tearing and/or cutting to see

which suits the painting best.

Paint backgrounds and stick paper onto them, or stick

on the paper and paint the background around it.

Resource created by Danielle Heiblum & Edward Dickenson

Activities for the Primary Classroom

Look at images of people painted by Lowry. They are famously called “matchstick people” – why do you think they gained this name? Look at key features: simple shapes, thin black legs with curved feet, simple block colours (often black and grey with occasional use of brighter reds and blues).

The simplicity of the figures allowed Lowry to fill a painting with a great number of different people, showing how busy industrial towns in the north-west of England were.

2.) To explore L.S. Lowry’s artistic style. (Art)

Let children practise drawing these matchstick men from the front, side and back. Model the difference in body shape. Show how you can either see the whole of the person’s face, the side of it, or just the hair at the back depending on how the figure is standing.

Have children draw all three types of figure on the same piece of paper. Add similar figures but change their height in order to depict children.

Resource created by Danielle Heiblum & Edward Dickenson

Look at how roads, pavements, railings, chimneys and buildings are depicted simply. Add some of these into your scene, or create a new scene starting with pavements and roads, then thinking carefully about where you would draw your figures.

Activities for the Primary Classroom

4. ) To empathise with the subjects of portraits through creative writing. (Literacy, Art, PSHE)

Have the class consider features such as:

Have pairs discuss these and start to build up various ideas about what we can tell about the subjects of these paintings, what they might be thinking about, looking at or talking about.

Use this to inform a piece of creative writing linked to the particular literary device the class is currently studying. It could be a dialogue transcript, a letter from one of the subjects to the other or a descriptive narrative of the scene, the events leading up to it or following it.

Discuss with the class the elements of a good story. These could include: setting; plot; backstory; characters; theme; point of view. You could highlight a particular literary style or device that you are studying, such as speech, play scripts or descriptive narrative.

Choose one of the images below to prompt discussion:

direction of gaze

objects

posture

facial expression

clothing relationships between the

sitters in the portrait

Resource created by Danielle Heiblum & Edward Dickenson