Self-Portrait of the Artist

I wanted to share a picture that Zahra drew yesterday. It's supposed to be a self-portrait. This is one of the skills the kids are working on in her class... being able to draw a person with certain features, like a head, trunk, arms and legs, and whatever else they'd like to include.

Last night, when I saw Zahra drawing this, I asked her why she looked so scary. She just giggled and said she wanted to be scary-looking.

I said, "But you don't look scary like that in real life."

She paused for a second, threw her arms up in pretend claws by her face, and threw on her scariest looking face. "Yes, I do."

"What about your fingers and toes? Look at how many fingers and toes you have in the picture. Do you have that many in real life?" I asked.

She studied her fingers and started to count them. She knew she didn't have that many. She said that's just the way she liked to draw them. "Where's the brown crayon, Mom? I want to color my hair."

We had a bunch of crayons sitting in a box on the table where she was drawing but the brown one was not among them. It's probably somewhere in this living room but at the moment, it's MIA.

She decided since she couldn't color her hair brown, she'd just use a myriad of colors.

When I asked what color her eyes were in real life, she said they were white.

"But what about the middle parts? The middle parts aren't white, are they?"

"No, those are brown. But we don't have a brown crayon," she argued. So she chose green, presumably since it is her favorite color. Also, she knows her arms aren't pink and purple but she was just trying to be creative. The color of the torso was supposed to be the color of her skin, so that was one thing she was attempting to do accurately. Also, she described her lower extremities in the picture as "[her] big fat legs!" (while laughing hysterically). Since her legs are about as skinny as you can get on a kid her height, it was pretty funny. The orange splotch on her leg is supposed to represent her boo-boo, as she calls it. (She really does have a little scab on her knee right now.)

As more pictures and drawings that seem of interest come along, I'll try to remember to scan them so I can share. I particularly liked this one because it took up a whole 8 x 11" paper and there was nothing else on it. I also had her write her name in the corner so you could see her progress with that but it's kind of hard to see. She chose the upper left-hand corner (above the purple line, which she drew to distinguish her name apart from the drawing).