IN THE CLASSROOM:Painting out of the (pizza) box

Over the last six years, Jordan Castleton has learned many different ways to do self-portraits.

The Lincoln Elementary School sixth-grader has painted herself in the style of the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, with her features drooping and elongated. She’s abandoned normal perspective altogether, grafting multiple angles of her head onto a canvas in Pablo Picasso style. On Wednesday, Jordan created another self-portrait in class — this one a fauvist painting, with her face portrayed in broad brush strokes and mismatched colors side-by-side.

“There are no mistakes in art,” said Jordan, 11, as she filled her makeshift canvas — the back of a pizza box — with a red background, a blue shirt, yellow skin and a little purple shade on the side of her head.

Wednesday was the second sixth-grade art class of the year at the Newport Beach school, where teacher Debi Haymond trains children of every grade level in realism, impressionism, pop art and other forms. Since the first grade, Haymond’s students have touched on nearly every genre of visual art and created portfolios to show for it.

“We’re all artists,” said Haymond, who also teaches at Eastbluff Elementary School. “That’s the message we want to get across.”

Last year, Haymond had her fifth-graders study American artists to go along with their history curriculum. At one point, the students paid tribute to pop artist Andy Warhol by finding consumer logos — Whoppers, Coca-Cola — and making multiple prints of them.

For the sixth-graders’ first art class in September, Haymond had taught them the history of fauvism, a French style of painting that rose in the late 19th century and rejected the natural method of the impressionists. Fauvist painters such as Henri Matisse, André Derain and Gustave Moreau used bold colors, broad brushstrokes and abstract angles to bring heightened emotion out of pictures.

A key technique of fauvism was using complementary colors alongside each other.To help her students, Haymond posted a chart on the board showing opposites on the color spectrum: orange and blue, red and green, yellow and purple. As students created self-portraits on their pizza boxes, they used yellow and orange tones for flesh and contrasted it with darker colors for shading and backgrounds.

The word “fauvism” derives from the French word for wild beasts, and Ryan Udkoff, 11, said the style helped to capture a subject’s character traits.

“It could show people a different side,” he said. “If the colors are dark, it could mean you’re angry a lot of the time.”