Julian Opie is a contemporary British artist, whom I have always liked for his unique way of representing human faces and figures with minimal details, thick black lines drawn to outline the shapes, with references to the linearity of Japanese art, the world of comics and the minimal symbolism of road signs. I invite you to take a look at his website and his latest works:
His faces, as modern icons, are perfectly characterized and recognizable, while maintaining a simplification reduced to very few elements. With 7th Grade students, we saw the multiple interpretations of portrait in modern and contemporary art, and we created a self-portrait in the style of Julian Opie, using the Sketchbook App with iPad and digital pen.
First, students took pictures of each other, to get a close-up self-portrait to draw digitally. Then, using the sketchbook’s layer function, we overlaid a transparent sheet and drew our self-portrait with a thick black graphic line.
The fundamental characteristics of the portrait in the style of Julian Opie are:
- the mouth, of which only the opening line and the underlying line of the lower lip are drawn.
- the eyes, of which only the pupils are drawn;
- the nose, of which only the nostrils are drawn;
Once the linear graphic portrait was completed, we filled the spaces (which must be strictly closed) with the “bucket” function using the “eyedropper” to take the colors from the photograph, especially for the skin and hair tones. The clothes and the background are colored with solid colors.
The surprising thing about these self-portraits is that they are extraordinarily similar to the subject, despite having very few somatic elements available.
