A popular new activity we have been trying at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on our school tours is portrait creation with plasticine. It engages even the most reluctant visitors. I’ve found it works especially well with a series of portraits located quite close to one another in our Modernist Tradition gallery. I tell the kids they can try to recreate one of the portraits, combine features from several or create their own unique portrait.
Younger gallery visitors aren’t sure they would like to meet Professor Felix Walter whose portrait was done by Charles Fraser Comfort in 1933. They tell me the professor’s eyebrows are too bushy and his hands too bony. Older students however are intrigued by the professor.
The kids invariably comment on Helen Esterman‘s long neck in this bronze portrait of her by Sir Jacob Epstein done in 1948. 
Junior highs seem especially enamored with Rubber Lips a 1997 work by Janet Werner. 
Younger students often identify most closely with The Farmer’s Daughter a portrait done by Prudence Heward in 1938. 
We try to give time for some kind of art activity on every tour we do with students at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. We want them to feel like they are artists too and can be creative just like the artists whose work they are seeing. 
Their plasticine masterpieces show just how creative so many of them are!!
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Sunday Afternoon at the Winnipeg Art Gallery
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