I was born in another country called Spain about a hundred years ago.
I began to draw and paint when I was the same age as you are.
Look, here are my pictures of my family.
This is my sister Lola.
I drew her a lot.
Here is my father.
You can see I painted him from the side.
And this is my mother, and my Aunt Pepa.
But one person I drew and painted all my life was me!
I painted a lot of people over the years.
When I painted sad people, I used the colour blue.
But when I painted happier people, I used brighter colours.
One day, I had a wonderful idea.
Why should I always paint people the way they look?
Why not try something new?
I began by moving round people as I painted them, looking at them from different places.
Watch, this way, hmm? This way you can only see one side of my face.
This is my profile.
Now you can just see the back of my head.
This way you can see my two eyes, but I am turned away from you.
And from here you can see my whole face clearly.
I decided to put all these different faces together and make one new face.
See what happens. Look, here are some paintings where I did this.
Why don't you try and do what I did?
You could get some photos of different people from magazines, cut out parts of their faces, their eyes, their noses, their mouths, and stick them all together to make a new face.
Use your imagination, good luck!
Video summary
A dramatized autobiography of the artist Pablo Picasso, showing his paintings and sketches and talking about the inspiration for his work.
Picasso talks about his family and his sister Lola, who was a huge inspiration for his work.
He then says that the one person he drew throughout his whole life was himself. He talks about how he used colours to show emotions.
This clip comes from the BBC series, Watch, Art: Myself and other People on BBC2.
Teacher Notes
- Pupils could carry out the suggested activity of cutting out facial features from magazines to create a portrait.
- Alternatively, pupils could create their own self-portrait pictures using photographs of themselves.
- Working in pairs, pupils could photograph each other's faces from a variety of angles.
- Once printed out, the pupils could use all the photographs of themselves to create a Picasso inspired self portrait.
This short film is relevant for teaching Art and Design at KS1 and KS2 in England and Wales and Northern Ireland and first level and second level in Scotland.
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