At least once a year, I do a self-portrait art project with my daughters. I love having a collection of paintings, drawings, and collages of how they see themselves at different ages.

For one of our recent self-portrait projects, we made adjective self-portraits. The girls had great fun brainstorming words to describe their looks, personality, and talents.

All About Me: Adjective Self-Portraits for Kids

Start with creating a drawing of yourself. It helps to look in the mirror, or have a recent photograph to look at while drawing. Don’t forget the little details like eyelashes, eyebrows, hair highlights, and freckles. We drew with pencil, then colored in with colored pencils and crayons this time.

Trace your pencil lines with a black Sharpie, if you like. For contrast, cut out your portrait and use a glue stick to attach it to colored construction paper.

Help your child make a list of descriptive adjectives or words – age, hair or eye color, talents, personality, hobbies, things they love, etc. My girls came up with the idea of writing their words on sticky labels with colorful markers. They were worried about making a mistake and ruining their pictures! So, try our way with labels, or write your words directly on your picture.

Don’t forget to have your kids write their names and date on the back – then you get a record of their cute signatures, too!

More self-portrait projects and inspiration:

• Collage Self-Portraits at Deep Space Sparkle – love the yarn hair!
• Picasso Tinted and Shaded Self-Portraits at Art Projects for Kids – neat monochromatic portraits and fun with color-mixing
• Coloring a Printed Photo at Spittin Toad – this teacher printed coloring pages from the kids’ photos, which they traced with Sharpie and watercolored. They look amazing!
• Life-Size Self Portraits at Mommy Labs – this is always a hit with my girls. I still have ones they made in preschool!

Happy creating!