How to Draw a Nate Williams Self Style Portrait
5 Easy Elementary Art Integration Ideas
With the new school year in full swing, I’ve been thinking about some tried and true elementary art integration ideas that are great for student learning and pretty easy to do. Here are some lessons that I co-taught with a classroom teacher during a HOT Block elementary art integration period. These are once a week sessions when a class comes to the elementary art room with their classroom teacher to learn reading, writing or math through art.
Kindergarten students love to draw, are motivated by the use of tech and love to write about their experiences. We are fortunate to have iPad carts for student to use, and they love it! The students drew in Doodle Buddy , I reflected the iPad with Reflector App and students were excited to write about the experience!
Fourth grade book character sculptures
These students, in addition to writing some information for a book report, created a book character sculpture out of low fire clay. After it was fired, the students added all the details for their main character with different materials, being sure to add all the important items the character needed in the story. If clay is not available, students can create a drawing or collage of the character instead.
First Grade Charlotte’s Web Character “Studies”
After listening to Charlotte’s Web in class, first grade students discussed all of the character’s details and had a mini elementary art lesson on drawing each of them. I used basic shapes to show students how to draw a person, pig, rat or spider. These drawings accompanied their writing about their favorite character.
Fern, Wilbur, Charlotte and Templeton
Nate Williams Tutorial Video
This self portrait art lesson for elementary students was inspired by the artist Nate Williams. It asks students to draw a simple profile of themselves and fill it with simple descriptive words. Variations of the hair and clothes are encouraged, but the basic idea is to literally fill their head with things that are important to them.
Nate Williams is an artist and designer who creates illustrations and hand lettering for magazines, books, packaging and advertising. His clients have included some pretty famous names, like the Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Target, New York Times and Coca Cola. Nate’s whimsical style of drawing is perfect for young artists to imitate because it is so simple, yet so creative. You can check out more of Nate’s work on his website HERE.
The one tip I would emphasize is that the portraits look best when the letters are as big and varied as they possibly can be. Students can use initial caps, all caps, cursive, any style at all. This is one time when they can break away from all the writing “rules” they usually follow, and try something new.
As a teacher, I would go so far as to give students extra credit for every different lettering style that shows up in their drawing. A lack of emphasis about this will tend to have them go on auto pilot when writing, and fill in each area the same way, as if writing on ruled paper. This is one time to encourage them to literally get creative with their writing.
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