Polaroid Portraits

A bit of a throwback for Dads of a certain vintage…  Weren’t polaroids technologically magical?  Create an image of you and your dad.  

This project was featured on:

http://www.hellowonderful.co/post/10-ARTISTIC-FATHER—-S-DAY-GIFTS-KIDS-CAN-MAKE

Check them out for other artistic Father’s Day gifts you can make!

Materials

• Canvas board
• Painter’s tape
• Pencil/eraser
• Acrylic paints
• Brushes
• Thin permanent markers

• Smock
• Craft tray

Directions

• Don your smock.

• Using your painter’s tape, make a border around your canvas folding your tape so half is on the front and half is on the back (we used a bit of a thicker version).

• Add a bit more painter’s tape at the bottom to make the white portion where you would hold your polaroid as it set.

• Rub over your painter’s tape to make sure it has fully adhered at all points.

• Sketch out your portrait of you and your dad or anyone special to you in the white space.

• We then painted our backgrounds.

• Carefully paint your people.  If you paint over your pencil lines, don’t worry- you can go over them with a thin permanent marker after the paint has dried.  We decided to do work on the paintings a bit every day after school (before Dad was home from work!).  We found this to be quite helpful as we could do a few colours at a time and let them dry, preventing them from mixing.  Acrylics were quite forgiving.  We could use layers of different colours to make any corrections and trace over the lines again.  We hope you can see this process below.  (If you happen to have any bleeding when you remove your tape you can also fix it with white acrylic!)

• Once done, trace over all your lines again (ours showed though the paint, making it easy to go over) with a thin, permanent marker.

• Carefully remove your tape, revealing your polaroid-esque image!

• Write a special note on the back of your painting, (including the date) for Dad to keep!

Purpose

• Experimenting with sketching
• Using tape to create negative spaces

Safety Notes

• Wear a smock and use a craft tray to protect your clothing and work surfaces.