Four giant Dorothy Wordsworth portraits by 120 children with 13,000 stickers!

This was a great mass-participation Pixel Portrait with Fairfield Primary School in Cockermouth.

It was commissioned by Kirkgate Arts & Heritage as part of I Am Dorothy, a programme supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund , marking 250 years since the birth of Dorothy Wordsworth.

The children were so excited to see the picture come together, square by little sticky-square, there was even football-style whooping and dancing from Y6 Team Purple!

As we were working with fours classes separately, we decided to create four separate versions of the portrait, each a different base colour. The four pictures combined to form a giant Warhol-style artwork.

All great pictures start with a canvas, in this case a massive bit of plyboard, cut to size at B&Q.

All four boards needed a little persuasion to lie flat.

Stacks of cards printed on the left, stacks of stickers on the right. Each has a watermark featuring native wildlife, with nature being Dorothy’s inspiration.

Here are all the template cards laid out on the board before the stickers are added.

We removed all the sticker backings to make peeling quicker in the classroom.

The Pixel Portrait design with each class’s Dorothy joined together.

Setting out the Sticker Bar for the class. Pupils finding & helping themelves to the right stickers was part of the challenge, especially avoiding mix-ups between ‘6 (Owl)’ and ‘9 (Pike)’!

We started each session with an introduction about Dorothy and the inspirations for the artwork, including a nod to Pointillism and 60s Pop Art.

All the pupils took to the task quickly & enthusiastically and were incredibly neat.

Year 4’s Dorothys are complete!

The whole class cheer as each and every completed card is added to the board.

One of the four finished Dorothy portraits with some of the happy sticker-ers who made it.