Making Faces

• Making faces
• Old man, young man
• Bas-relief
• Masks from Benin
• Working with a professional artist
• Looking at masks
• Masks in Venice
• The Notting Hill Carnival
• The Masked Ball
• Chinese faces
• Make your own masks

All over the world, artists and craftspeople have been making faces for centuries. Sometimes the faces are meant to be realistic, like a photograph. Some artists like to draw cartoons which are designed to make you notice a person's features by exaggerating them.

Making Faces

The following images portray faces in three-dimensional form. Look closely at these pictures (click on an image to enlarge it):

What materials have the artists used to create their artefacts? (Clue: there are four different types of material used in this selection.)

Look at the sculpture of the old man.

'Head and shoulder' sculptures like this are called busts. How do we know the figure is not of a young man?

Try to explain the technique used by the sculptor to make the face look old.

If you were creating a bust of one of your friends, what would you do differently to make it look young?

The artist has used an interesting combination of materials by putting a straw hat onto the bust and mounting it on a wooden plinth. Imagine you are able to touch the sculpture. Can you describe the textures you can feel?