Self-Portrait Collages

As a final project for their portfolio development course, students created large-scale, self-portrait collages. The goal was to create bold, expressive self-portraits that allowed the artists to showcase their skills and personality.

Students first created the background on canvas and then painted the portrait over this surface. For the background, students used a variety of materials, including scraps of patterned paper, dried flowers, newspaper, and pages from their class notebooks and from their own sketchbooks. The overlying portraits were also done with a range of materials: ink wash, acrylic paint, and even coffee.