Contour Line Portraits

My 7th grade digital art class has been working on creating contour line self portraits this week. It has been difficult to find free software for the students to use, as my school does not have any Adobe programs, but I did find a pretty great site called pixlr. In pixlr you can accomplish a lot of the same processes that you might use in Photoshop.

The students and I learned about cropping, rotating, color changing, and focal blurs last week. This week I had them focus on taking a self portrait, adding a layer, and drawing on that layer with the sketch tool in order to create a contour line portrait. The results are pretty great!

This project came out so great because my students had computer mice to use thanks to a grant for my art room. In the beginning of the year I wrote a Donor's Choose grant and asked for a class set of computer mice. Friends, family and strangers all donoated to the cause and now my students can create awesome, inspiring artwork with the right tools!