Posted by Cindy on March 27, 2010
We spent much of our month with Matisse completing art with scissors since Matisse’s later works were often collages or realistic and abstract art constructed from cuttings.
The artwork below was actually harder than it looks. I asked the kids to use rulers to measure the desired sized blocks of color for the background. The abstract pieces placed on top were folded, cut and opened so that each piece would be symmetrical. (See, I hide math everywhere!)
Henri Matisse
Olga’s Gallery
Warning: There are many nudes!
Paintings We Studied
I chose these paintings by Matisse because we were studying erosion at the time during nature study. Each of the paintings includes erosion of some sort. We had fun looking for and drawing erosion during our nature walks. These painting ideas and the nature walk ideas came from the Everchanging Erosion NaturExplorers unit.
Open Window
Luxembourg Gardens
La Moulade
The Bank
Lesson Ideas
KinderArt Lessons
Paper Collages
Mulit-Media Design
Posted by Cindy on March 2, 2010
We’ve been so immersed in our 1900′s history studies, that Charles Russell took a bit of a back seat this month. We did find the time to practice a little horse drawing, though. Enjoy the resources below!
Charles Russell
About Charles Russell
Paintings We’re Studying
Innocent Allies
Doubtful Handshake
Drifters
Round-up on the Musselshell
Lesson Ideas
How to Draw a Horse
Drawing Horses
Posted by Cindy on January 29, 2010
Seurat is such a fun artist to study! His use of pointillism was the biggest topic during the month, which made for some fun art projects. The painting above was an attempt at recreating an “Alfalfa” style painting (see below) with a mixture of strokes and styles. After using many different tools to create pointillism, we greatly respect how long it must have taken Seurat to finish any of his works created strictly with dots!
Georges Seurat
Olga’s Gallery
Paintings We Studied
La Grande Jatte
The Circus
Cows in a Field
Alfalfa
Books We Read
Lesson Ideas
Pointillism Activity Ideas
KinderArt Pointillism
Art Exercises for Kids
Posted by Cindy on January 12, 2010
Last week we completed lots of activities to learn about and better understand light and color. The color part of the unit was a super time to integrate art/artist study into the theme. Here’s a glimpse into the unit activities.
A homemade pinhole camera allowed us to see images. Can you see the upside down image of Mahayla on the camera's paper? Since light rays travel in a straight line, they flow into the pinhole of the box so that the rays cross one another and invert the image.
A homemade kaleidoscope allowed us to see the effects of reflection.
We used several curved materials to split white light into the color spectrum.
Using a compass and protractor to create circles for color wheels turned into a great math lesson!
Color wheels were mounted on pencils and spun to see what happens when colors are mixed. We made a black and white wheel, too, that turned gray.
We used primary colors to create secondary colors and painted with our new colors.
We each chose one primary color and created new hues by tinting and shading our color. A color is tinted when white is added to it and shaded when black is added to it. Once we had a nice color palette, we made monochromatic paintings.
A chromatography experiment helped us separate colors from markers.
Our study of Seurat this month fit in perfectly as we discussed how images are made up of pixels. A pointillism project inspired by Seurat helped drive the idea of pixels home.
In a discussion about convex lenses making things look bigger, we completed this very simple demonstration to show that anything curved and transluscent will magnify an image.
A homemade microscope helped us to see a slide more closely.
A real microscope with 10x and 43x magnifiers helped us see the slide much better! (Scour your local curriculum sales. I bought this microscope a couple years ago for TWO dollars!)
This week we’re focusing on sound. A post of those activities will follow soon, along with a copy of the final test I’ll give. Since this unit was almost entirely hands-on/project-based (and because I need to get moving on our last HUGE unit of the year – 1900′s history – I won’t be assigning final projects.)
Posted by Cindy on December 4, 2009
Gauguin was an interesting character! I can’t claim that he’s my favorite artist, but we still enjoyed our time spent with him this month.
Self-Portraits
Below are the resources that have been in the sidebar. We won’t be doing artist or composer study in December. I’ll have resources in the sidebar again in January!
Paul Gauguin
Olga’s Gallery
Cattle Drinking
Landscape
Black Pigs
Piti Teina
Lesson Ideas
Pet Still Life
Self-Portrait
Various Worksheets and a Bio
Books We’ll Read
