UE: Van Gogh Self-Portraits

One of the Upper Elementary students was really inspired by Middle School's landscape drawings and asked me if they could do the lesson too. I love it when students get inspired by each other! Rather than doing the same lesson, I had UE paint Van Gogh's self-portraits. We looked at many of his self-portraits and discussed how he used color and texture in his work. After sketching the face together, I demonstrated how to layer stroke after stroke the way Van Gogh did. Small details like using the round brush instead of the flat brush was really important in this lesson. It's great seeing students carefully choose various sized brushes to achieve different strokes (putting them in a utensil tray is an effective way to organize them btw!)