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National Portrait Gallery

Year 9 Art students visited the National Portrait Gallery on January 23^rd and took part in a ‘Portrait Hunt’ activity and self-led tour of the gallery. Students tracked down contemporary and historic works in different wings of the gallery and completed a written task about the style and meaning of works. Looking at portraits of Queen Elizabeth 1 from 1592 and a Malala Yousafzai portrait work by Shirin Neshan made in 2018 brought different approaches within portraiture into focus, broadening students’ understanding of what’s possible. Students were asked to consider what art elements were used by artists in these and other works and asked to reflect on how they could develop their own use of colour, line, shape etc in their own artwork.