Year 6 - Art and design
Painting a portrait with colour and feeling
Charting self: exploring portrait and identity
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Study Guides
This pupil-friendly study guide includes a unit summary, clear notes, common mistakes, and quick questions with answers.
Unit Summary
Made in collaboration with October Gallery, in this unit pupils express personal identity through portraiture, material, memory and imagination. Pupils create textured paintings, symbolic surfaces, close-up feature portraits, and expressive self-maps that combine journey and face.
Lesson Summary
You will learn to create a layered portrait to explore how colour and paint share emotion and identity.
Key Notes
- Paint can be used to explore place, memory or feeling.
- A colour wash can shape the mood of a portrait.
- Emotional tone can be suggested through restraint, layering and colour.
- Strong colours can suggest presence, emphasis or absence.
Vocabulary To Learn
- colour wash: a thin, watery layer of paint brushed over a surface to add soft colour or tone
- pigment: the colour part of paint that makes it bright or bold
- tone: how light or dark a colour is
- restraint: using a small amount of something on purpose
Common Mistakes To Avoid
- A portrait has to look real or neat to show who someone is.
3 Quick Questions (With Answers)
1. Explain the lesson in two key points.
Paint can be used to explore place, memory or feeling. A colour wash can shape the mood of a portrait.
2. What does this key word mean in this lesson? 'colour wash'
a thin, watery layer of paint brushed over a surface to add soft colour or tone.
3. Correct this common mistake.
Mistake: A portrait has to look real or neat to show who someone is. Correction: Portraits can show feeling, memory, or mood without looking realistic. Artists use colour, texture and shape to tell a story about the person.
More Lessons In This Unit
Browse all guides in the Year 6 Art and design guide library.