collaged portraits with mandalla backgrounds

A printmaking & collage piece
This mixed media piece combines printmaking and collage as well as a bit of art history. To start, students learn about mandallas and the cultures that practice them. They create their own design for 1/4 of a mandalla first in their sketchbooks, and then replicated on a piece of lino block. When printing, they turn the lino block clockwise and the design, when repeated 4 times, makes a circle pattern. This is the same radial symmetry that mandallas have and it is also a but of a fun surprise - like making a snowflake out of paper - to see how the design turns out. They cover a sheet of cardboard with their mandalla design and then we learn about reductive printing, wherein a bit more is carved off the original block and overlayed. They add their reductive design on top and this serves as their background for their self-portrait piece.

To create the outline for the self-portraits, students took photographs of one another using a DSLR camera. I wanted it to be self-guided and give them a chance to handle the cameras. We talk about proper ways to hold a "real" camera and how to get the best shot. After all photos have been taken, I print them out, and they trace their images onto a sheet of transparency paper. This isn't really a drawing project, so I'm not concerned that it is traced. The outline gives them a framework for their collage, that they create out of magazine pieces, directly onto the cardboard backing. After the magazine collage has been glued on, they fuse the transparency sheet to the cardboard using clear glue.