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A dramatised autobiography of the artist Pablo Picasso, showing his paintings and sketches and talking about the inspiration for his work. Picasso talks about his family and his sister Lola, who was a huge inspiration. He tells how the one person he drew throughout his whole life was himself and that he used colours to show emotions.

The artist also talks about the day he decided to change the way he painted people. Rather than painting them the way they looked, he explored the face from different angles and tried to capture all of these at once. He demonstrates studying a person’s profile and then their whole face to show how the facial features can appear to change when seen from a different angle. Finally Picasso encourages the children watching to cut up faces from magazines to make new ones using his techniques.

Within a topic on biographies and autobiographies, students could watch this clip to gain insight into the life of Pablo Picasso. The historical content within the clip could be used as the beginnings of research about Picasso, in preparation for writing a biography of his life.

Additionally, his focus on self portraits could enhance discussions around autobiography as not only a textual art form, but a visual one. Students could explore the style of his autobiographical paintings and create, first their own self portrait sketch and then their own self portrait painting, in the style of a Picasso self portrait.