How can I use this resource?

With this resource, you can discover the life and work of Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter who expressed her suffering and identity in colorful and surreal paintings. You can also color 30 templates of different parts of her self-portrait and glue them together to make a large poster. This is a fun way to practice teamwork and artistic skills. You can use this resource to decorate your classroom or bulletin board with a stunning, giant art poster.

What does this resource contain?

This resource contains 30 templates for making a giant poster of El Marco. Each template has a part of the painting that you can color according to the original or your own imagination. The templates are based on the painting that is in the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris. The resource contains three different sizes:

• Coloring-in templates (Letter format / 8.5 x 11 in / 21.6 x 27.9 cm)

• Small poster (19 x 28.7 in / 48.3 x 72.9 cm)

• Big group work poster (31.5 x 48 in / 80 x 122 cm)

You can print the templates on white paper and color them with crayons, markers, pencils, or paints. The resource also provides you with some information about the artist Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo: A life of pain and passion in self-portraits

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who used her art as a way of coping with her physical and emotional pain. She had a difficult life, marked by illness, accidents, and a turbulent marriage with another famous painter, Diego Rivera. She painted many self-portraits that show her feelings and experiences. El Marco is one of her most original and innovative self-portraits. She painted it in 1938, using a "mixed medium" technique. She used an aluminum sheet to paint her face and the blue background, and a glass sheet to paint the border of flowers on its back side. It shows her face framed by colorful flowers and leaves, creating a contrast between her serious expression and the cheerful background. 

The majority of her paintings are painful self-portraits that show how she was feeling at the time and how sad and lonely she was. She painted everything very precisely – just like a photographer. She was familiar with such realistic representations from an early age since her father was a successful photographer. Just as he did, she tried to capture and hold on to the visible world in portraits and still-lifes. But in contrast to her father’s photography, her paintings are unreal, dream-like, and absurd. They are more than realistic, something we also call surreal. Because of this, Frida Kahlo later became counted as one of the surrealists, although she defended herself against this label: “People think of me as a surrealist. This is incorrect. I’ve never painted dreams. What I depicted was my reality.” And anyone who’s standing in front of one of her paintings would understand what she meant by this.