Explore your identity, and your personal strengths and qualities by creating your own superhero portrait
What you’ll need: Mirror, sketching pencil, coloured pencils, different coloured paper, scissors, glue, and collage materials, if available.
What’s it for?
This activity can help you to explore your personal strengths and qualities, as well as aspects of your identity. In this activity you will be drawing a self-portrait in two halves. The first half is a drawing of yourself, and the second half is of your imagined superhero self that is inspired by your personal strengths and qualities.
Check In:
Notice how you’re feeling right now. Close your eyes and notice what’s going on inside your mind and body.
How are you feeling?
What are you thinking?
How does your body feel?
Method:
The composition of everyone’s self-portrait will be different because how you see yourself in the mirror is unique to all individuals. Focus on the uniqueness of your own facial features.
The superhero half of the picture will be inspired by your personal strengths.
First think about what you are like. What are your strengths? What do you like about yourself?1
Write down three superhero powers that embody your strength and qualities. These can be new or imaginary superpowers if appropriate
Then decide and write down two or three colours for your superhero costume. These colours should relate to your powers.
Now that you have drafted your ideas, fold the paper you will be using for your portrait in half
Take your mirror and prop it into a position where you can see a good view of yourself; if you prefer, you can create a full body portrait or one that focuses on your upper body.
The next step is for you to look at yourself in the mirror and on one half of your paper, begin to draw only half of your face and/or body.
Once you have drawn half of your face on one side of the folded paper, you will need to mark out where the eyes, mouth, nose, and shoulders will be on the blank side.
You can now draw your superhero half!
Once both sides have been drawn, colour or paint your portrait
Once you have finished your portrait, spend a moment looking at your artwork, and think about what you like about yourself and what you like about your superhero self.
Ask yourself if there are any ways, you could be more like your superhero half.
Extra Activity: As an extra activity you may like to create and draw your superhero symbol/logo. This logo can also be inspired by your strengths and qualities.
When you’ve finished, spend a moment reflecting on the activity and ask yourself the following questions:
Did you learn anything new about yourself while you did this activity?
Did you find it challenging or easy to think about your strengths and qualities?
How do the strengths and qualities you identified in this activity help you in your daily life, can you think of any examples?
Can you think about how your strength and qualities help those around you, and can you think of any new ways you could help others?
Were there any powers that your superhero half had that you wished you could use in your real life?
Conclusion:
This activity helps you to explore your identity through looking, as well as encouraging you to think positively about yourself. How we feel about ourselves is strongly linked to how we feel about our identities. So, when we are aware of our strengths and qualities, we strengthen our sense of identity and improve our self-esteem.
Furthermore, knowing our strengths and qualities helps us feel more accomplished and resilient when trying new things or meeting new people and can even help with building even stronger relationships.
Take a moment to notice how you are feeling at the end of this activity. Did you discover anything surprising? What can you take away to make you feel better about yourself from this activity?
If you would like to, share something about your experience with this activity with someone you live with! Ask the person who looks after you to send us an email if you have any questions or comments about the activity, or would like to send us any pictures (info@catcorner.co.uk). Don't forget to subscribe for more fun CAT activities!
Created by Kamala Roberts © October 2021
Creative Arts Used: Art
Psychological Areas Explored: Resilience, self-esteem, emotional wellbeing, self-exploration
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These activities could be done by children of all ages, but some may need the support of their parent or carer to read the instructions or complete the activity safely.
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