PIECES OF ME - Self-Portrait Collage
SEASON 7 | PROJECT 1/45 | 10.01.25
MODULE: Collage | GRADE LEVELS: TK - 6 | DURATION: 1 Hour
ARTIST VIDEO
Video Editing by Jorge Davies, Graphics by Melissa Sabol
PROJECT VIDEO
OVERVIEW
Pieces of Me: Self-Portrait Collage is a 2-D mixed media project that invites students to create portraits that show more than just how they look—it tells their story. Beginning with a photo of themselves, students will alter and transform it to reflect who they are or who they want to be. The background will be built from meaningful scraps of daily life—notes, snack wrappers, doodles, or old assignments. These pieces provide “ready-made” color, texture, and lines, while also adding clues to the portrait’s meaning. Each collage becomes a one-of-a-kind reflection of self-expression, identity and imagination.
WHY IT'S IMPORTANT​
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See Art and Yourself in a Bigger Way – Students learn to look at art and themselves through a wider lens. Using personal fragments shows them that ordinary things from their lives can be meaningful in art.
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Build Composition and Design Skills – Students practice arranging backgrounds and foregrounds, using contrast, balance, and negative space. Combining personal artifacts with drawing helps them make thoughtful decisions about composition.
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Exploration of Identity Through Material – Students experiment with expressing who they are through both found materials and drawn elements, seeing how ordinary items can be transformed into powerful, symbolic ar
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Narrative & Visual Storytelling – Each student’s portrait becomes a story in itself. The layering of fragments encourages them to think about sequencing, rhythm, and how visual elements guide the viewer’s understanding of their identity.
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Experiment and Play – Students are encouraged to take creative risks, like turning a receipt into a rainbow or a note into a secret code. Art becomes a place to explore, not worry about being perfect.
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Reflect and Share – Handling memory-filled fragments helps students think about their experiences and emotions. Sharing their work shows each student’s unique voice and builds empathy.
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MATERIALS
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Instant Camera & Thermal paper (or photo)
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Scissors
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Copy Paper (½ sheet)
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Watercolor Paper (5x7)
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Glue Stick
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4B Pencil
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Alcohol Markers (permanent)
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Colored Pencils
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Variety of Personal Ephemera [or Scraps] **NOTE: Students are invited to gather 2-D personal scraps—small pieces of daily life that carry meaning or memories. These might be snack wrappers, toy packaging, notes from family, old homework, ticket stubs, or doodles of things they love. Each item should reflect personal experiences and interests.
FEATURED ARTIST
DOUG BLANC
Doug Blanc is a Joshua Tree–based artist whose work blends collage, drawing, and painting to create layered portraits of people, animals, and the desert itself. Best known for his large-scale skulls on reclaimed plywood, Blanc transforms ordinary fragments—found objects, scraps, notes, wrappers—into powerful images that carry both memory and presence. Trained in life drawing and anatomy, he uses a range of techniques to create portraits of family members, himself, LEGOs, or animal skulls. His lifelong drawing practice grounds this process, giving depth to artworks that show how everyday materials and natural fragments can hold stories of identity and place.
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As a kid, Doug filled stacks of paper with drawings inspired by LEGOs, comic books, and Dungeons & Dragons. At Antioch College, he encountered Abstract Expressionism, which shaped his visual language, and later at the California College of Arts and Crafts, he earned his BFA in drawing while expanding into new materials. From 1998 to 2016, while living in Oakland, Doug created several series—including Laika, Nord, and Phobia—that combined roofing tar, acrylic, drawing, and collage. Today, his Crania series reflects life in the Mojave Desert, where he paints images of sun-bleached bones and branches on salvaged plywood, honoring the quiet stories embedded in the desert landscape.
ARTISTS TO KNOW
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Romare Bearden (1911–1988)
is best known for his bold, jazz-inspired collages that weave together fragments of photographs, paint, and paper. His work shows how scraps of everyday life can be layered into powerful visual stories. Bearden often drew on memory, music, and community—especially the Harlem neighborhood where he lived—to capture both personal experience and shared history. His art reminds us that mixing images from our own lives can create compositions full of rhythm, energy, and meaning. He used fragments of everyday life—memories, music, and images from his community—to build portraits that went beyond appearance, showing identity and experience.
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Romare Bearden, Untitled (The Family), 1969, Mixed Media Collage of Various Papers and Fabric on Board, 17 5/16 x14 in.
Kurt Schwitters (1887 - 1948)
was an innovative artist known for transforming everyday materials—scraps of paper, wrappers, tickets—into bold, lively works of art. He created collages, sculptures, and immersive environments that combined color, texture, and rhythm, showing that ordinary objects could carry beauty and meaning. Schwitters’ work was playful, experimental, and full of creative energy, blending abstraction with a sense of story and movement. Born in Hanover, Germany, he studied art formally but quickly explored new ways of working with found materials. Associated with the Dada movement, Schwitters developed a unique style that influenced generations of artists in collage, mixed media, and installation art.
Kurt Schwitters, Mz 601, 1923. Paint and paper on cardboard. 17 × 15 in. Sprengel Museum, Hannover, loan from Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Stiftung. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983)
creates large, layered portraits that blend painting with images pulled from everyday life—family photos, Nigerian magazines, and pieces of popular culture. Her work shows how fragments of memory, tradition, and daily experience can overlap to form rich and complex identities. Born in Enugu, Nigeria, and later moving to the United States, Crosby’s art reflects life lived between cultures, weaving together the personal and the global. Her compositions invite us to see how scraps of the familiar—whether a pattern, a photograph, or a remembered moment—can be transformed into powerful stories about who we are.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mama, Mummy and Mamma, 2014. Acrylic, color pencils, charcoal and transfers on paper, 84 x 144 in.
Cy Twombly (1928–2011)
is celebrated for turning marks, loops, scrawls, and words into visual poetry. His paintings combine spontaneous gesture and writing—words that nearly fade, lines that dance across blank space—to evoke memory, myth, and emotion. Twombly once said that his marks are “felt” rather than described, showing that drawing itself can carry meaning. He often layered calligraphic gestures over fields of quiet color or erased traces of marks to let hidden stories peek through. His work shows us how fragments of language, gesture, and memory can live together—not fully explained, but enough to invite the viewer to look deeper.
Cy Twombly, Natural History Part I: Mushrooms V, 1974. Lithograph, grano-lithograph and collotype in colors with collage and hand-coloring in crayon, on Rives Couronne paper, 29 × 22 in. Edition of 98.
VOCABULARY
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Balance – When shapes, colors, and space are arranged so the artwork feels even, not too heavy or crowded.
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Background – The part of your artwork that looks farthest away, behind the main image.
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Collage – Art made by gluing different papers or materials together.
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Composition – How all the parts of your artwork are arranged to create the whole piece.
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Contrast – Making some parts of your artwork stand out by being different, like dark vs. light.
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Ephemera – Small fragments or keepsakes from your life, like notes, postcards or tickets.
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Finishing Touches – Small details added at the end to complete your artwork.
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Foreground – The part of your artwork that looks closest to you.
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Intuitive Design – Making art choices by trusting your feelings and ideas, not rules.
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Layering – Placing papers, drawings, or materials on top of each other.
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Mindfulness – Paying close attention to what you are doing and how it feels.
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Mixed Media – Using more than one kind of material in your artwork.
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Negative Space – The empty space around and between objects in your artwork.
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Personal Artifacts – Pieces from your everyday life that you include in your artwork.
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Reflect – Thinking about how your artwork expresses your ideas or your stories.
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Self-Portrait – A picture or drawing of yourself.
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Texture – How a surface feels, or how it looks like it might feel.