This week I decided to switch up my regular portrait for sixth grade with a cartoon one. Every year I do a portrait and it’s not always the students first choice 🙂 I know they need the sketching skills for high school and life so I march on and try to make it fun. And an added bonus I told them they had to be nice to me since I was teaching them on my birthday! I believe they came out fabulous. I am always trying to balance giving them the tools to complete the project without doing it for them. But I think they were very successful and these make you want to smile.
Materials Needed:
- Pencils and erasers
- 50 lb watercolor paper 12 x 18 inch–http://www.discountschoolsupply.com/Product/ProductDetail.aspx?product=24037&keyword=watercolor%20paper&scategoryid=0&CategorySearch=&Brand=&Price=
- Tempera cakes–http://www.dickblick.com/products/blick-tempera-cakes/Tempera paint in brown, orange and white if you are in a rush and need to finish for face colors
Skill Learned:
Sketching and drawing cartoon features for a portrait from shapes.
I started with the students by discussing the attributes of cartoon features and what the differences are from cartoon and real faces. Then I showed them several color sketches on the internet from anime to old-fashioned cartoons. My real inspiration for this project was this link on pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/145804106660112401/. Once we went through the shapes on the link I walk them all through one of the shapes. I believe we did the rectangle and went through the facial features etc. Then I let them get started with their own. We used quite a bit of paper maybe 3 per student but they came out wonderful. I did pull up some great links on the internet for eyes and mouth expressions. Here are those links: http://www.designthedream.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cartooneyes.jpg—http://www.animeoutline.com/how-to-draw-anime-and-manga-mouth-expressions/
Now I need to get back to finishing my Christmas shopping–Happy sketching!
laselvabeachart 
