 Hi there, I'm Miss Sandy and I'm going to be the teacher for the Creative Self-Portraits class for kids and I'm really excited to see what you're going to make. I'm posting this video on YouTube because I think there's some grown-ups who also need to hear my message. In the class, we're going to study five different types of self-portraits. A self-portrait is when you make a picture of yourself. Sometimes it looks just like you and other times it's really creative and might not look a lot like you, but it looks a lot like the things that you love. All of your favorite colors and your favorite shapes and your favorite hobbies can make it into a self-portrait that's really beautiful. There's only a few rules in this class and the first rule is that it's okay to have fun. Just explore and be crazy and silly. Feel free to laugh while you're doing your drawing and bring your personality into it. If you're a silly person, make a silly portrait. Some of my portraits that you're going to see in the class are really simple. Some of them I just do stick figures and other ones I do a little more realistically and you can do a lot of different styles as well and you can try different things. That's why we take classes so we can learn new things. The second rule is it's okay to explore. If I say something in the class about using pastels in a certain way and that makes you think, hmm, what if I did that with my watercolor paint? Then it's okay to stop for a little bit and go try it with your watercolor paints and see if it works. If it does great and if it doesn't, that's okay too because you've learned something. And the third rule is that we're going to keep on the positive side. When we do self-portraits, a lot of what we end up putting into the portrait is thinking about who we are. What are our personality traits? What are the things that we do well? And what are the skills and the gifts that we already have? I also like to think about things that I'm not good at yet that I want to still learn. I have so many things in science that I don't know and I don't understand yet. But instead of telling myself that I'm not good at science, I just say I'm still learning at science and I'm a really good student. If you end up having one of those thoughts that makes you feel sad about yourself, you know what I'd like you to do? I want you to go talk to somebody else about it. Talk to a grown-up that you trust. Might be one of your parents or a grandparent or an aunt or an uncle, somebody at school like a teacher or a counselor. There's lots of people who would love to help you get through some of those sad thoughts and get back to feeling good and positive and happy about your life and your future. And art is a great way to do that because we can process all of that while we're making beautiful pictures. And the fourth rule is that you don't have to do anything that I do in the way that I do it in class. I'm going to show you an approximate way to do it, but I want you to be creative and use your own style to create your artwork. There is no right or wrong. It's all good when you're making art because you're expressing yourself and whatever you make is just fine. In the coming months, I'm going to be adding some of the student artwork to the lesson pages so that you can see lots of different ways that you can interpret the same idea. It's really exciting to see what other people do. So if you have a grown-up who's on Facebook and they can take a picture of your artwork and post it there, maybe you can even get them to open Facebook so you can see what other students are doing as well. It's really exciting to take a class as a community of artists and be able to share what we're learning and what we're creating. I hope you're ready for an exciting adventure in making beautiful self-portraits. And I'll see you in lesson one.