A No-Prep Sub Plan for Portraiture (Colorado)

Leaving a portraiture lesson for a substitute is harder than leaving one for almost any other art topic. Students are self-conscious about faces, the technical instruction is genuinely difficult to give, and a substitute with no art background cannot demonstrate proportion or correct a drawing at the desk. What follows is a plan a Colorado sub can run cold, with no materials beyond paper and pencil, and it produces work worth collecting.

Choose a task that needs looking, not teaching

The trap is setting free drawing from imagination, which produces the same cartoon face from every student and teaches nothing. The alternative is a structured looking task. Students analyze existing portraits and then make a short, tightly constrained drawing based on what they found. Analysis requires no demonstration. Constraint removes the fear of a bad likeness. And a printed portrait on every desk means the substitute never has to answer a question about how to draw an eye.

Pick four portraits from different periods and print them large. Self-portraits work best because the artist's decisions are more visible when they are also the subject.

The lesson, phase by phase

1. Ten minutes: silent looking. Each student has one portrait and writes ten observations, no opinions allowed. "The light comes from the upper left" counts. "It looks sad" does not. The purpose is to slow down looking, which is the skill the entire topic rests on.
2. Fifteen minutes: the grid trace. Students rule a light three-by-three grid over a printed copy and mark, in each cell, only where the darkest area falls. No outlines. The purpose is to see the portrait as a tonal map rather than as a face, which is the single shift that improves student portrait work most.
3. Twenty minutes: the constrained drawing. On a fresh sheet, students redraw their portrait using only three tones and no line. Pencil held flat, side of the lead. The purpose is tonal massing. The constraint is what protects nervous students, because nobody expects a likeness from three tones.
4. Ten minutes: written comparison. Two sentences on what their version keeps and what it loses. This is the piece the substitute collects and the piece you read first.

Choose the source portraits from something already prepared so the sub is not handed a folder of loose printouts. Albrecht Dürer – self-portrait and printmaking is the natural anchor here, since the self-portraits give students dense tonal information and the printmaking material explains why the marks look the way they do without the sub having to know anything about engraving.

What the substitute needs written down

Keep the plan to one page and put the timings in the left margin. Include four things and nothing else: the phase timings, the exact instruction to read aloud for each phase, the rule that no student is to be told their drawing looks good or bad, and the note that all work is collected face down at the end. That last rule matters in portraiture more than in other topics, because a student who thinks their drawing will be displayed will draw safely.

Add one line of what to say when a student asks for help with proportion: "Compare it to the picture and change one thing." A substitute who has that sentence will not invent a rule about the eyes being halfway down the head.

What you do with the work on Monday

Read the written comparisons first, then look at the drawings. A student who wrote that their version lost the individual features but kept the sense of the light has understood the lesson entirely, whatever the drawing looks like. That is the pairing you are grading.

Follow it with a lesson that takes the tonal massing idea further, because a class that has just spent twenty minutes thinking in three tones is unusually receptive to how light describes a form. Claude Monet – Impressionism and the Painting of Light extends exactly that thread into color, and the slide deck is editable so you can drop in the four portraits students already worked from. If you want the sub plan to sit inside a coherent year rather than being an isolated day, Art Complete – Ready-to-Use Curriculum for High School Art (Grades 9–12) gives you the grades 9 to 12 sequence to slot it into, which means the cover day advances the unit instead of pausing it. Handled this way you come back to thirty pieces of evidence and a class that got a real lesson, which is not what most people expect from a day out.

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