The author has always loved teaching a lesson on self-portraits to her eighth-grade students. Portraits raise the bar and, when they are successful, convince the students that they really can draw. Each year they explore the basic concepts of portraiture, but use different media, sizes and styles. The author likes to interject art history and study a particular artist, completing their portraits in the style or flavor of that artist. This year they focused on the work of 20th-century printmaker Maurits Cornelis (M.C.) Escher. To initiate the lesson, students explored the work of Escher in "M.C. Escher, The Graphic Work" (Benedict-Taschen Publishing; 1992) and through an Internet search for "M.C. Escher" for other material on the artist. Their particular focus was on Escher's 1943 self-portrait. The portrait is a close view where he appears to be looking out of a round portal. The students would mimic this idea in their own portraits. They also took a close look at his tessellation patterns because the assignment included creating an original tessellation design in their compositions. In this particular lesson, when the students had successfully completed their portrait, they designed an interlocking bird, fish or geometric tessellation design to incorporate in the negative space. (Contains 2 online resources.)