with students at Kenwood Academy, Chicago
Challenge: Piggybacking on the Creative Combine lesson, students create a split screen artwork by taking 3 individual student portraits and combining them into one surreal, hybrid portrait.
Materials: phones with cameras and a collage app such as Instacollage
Process:
• Students work in groups, with at least one camera phone per group.
• Groups photograph portraits of each member.
• Using a collage app such as InstaCollage, move and compose the faces until the edges align. The final image will only show a portion of each face, but should appear to be one new, unified person. While these hybrids will appear surreal to students who know each other, attempting to combine different genders or facial features will create more unexpected portraits for viewers who do not know the subjects.
Lesson Expansion:
• Repeat lesson with full body portraits, perhaps in unique gestures
• Have students photograph their pets’ faces the night before for homework, and incorporate to create animal/human portraits
