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

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

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

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.)

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

We’ve had a fun month studying Rodin (despite my preference for paintings over sculpture.)  I’ve been rather slow posting our projects, so here are two weeks worth of projects.

After studying The Hand of God and other hand sculptures, we completed 2-dimensional abstract hand drawings.  The kids simply traced their hands and used at least two different mediums to create an abstract design.  I love these!

You can see the Ivory soap sculpting we did as one of the projects during our Presidents unit in this post.  I didn’t get a close-up of the sculptures because they weren’t great, but you can see the small squares of Ivory soap in the two overall project pictures.  They didn’t turn out as quite the masterpieces that I’d hoped, but it was fun anyway!

To end the study, we pulled out some clay and tried a little sculpting.

“Flowers in a Basket”

“The Creek”

Here are the resources that have been in the sidebar this month.  I hope they’re helpful to you!

Francois Auguste-Rene Rodin

Artchive Gallery

The Thinker

Jean de Fiennes, Draped

Rose Beuret

The Hand of God

Lesson Ideas

Many Ideas for Drawing and Sculpting Hands

Henri Rousseau

Olga’s Gallery

Landscape with Cattle

View of Bridge Sevres

The Football Players

Monkeys in a Jungle

Lesson Ideas

Princeton Online – Several Ideas

KinderArt – Fantasy Jungle

Lesson Plan Page – Stained Glass

Books We Read

Don’t forget to sign up for the giveaway that takes place bright and early Thursday, October 1st!

Rousseau spent many days studying, sketching and painting exotic plants while visiting huge greenhouses that housed plants and trees from all over the world.  These plants inspired him to paint jungle scenes.  In most of his jungle scenes, you’ll find animals or people hiding in the midst of the plants.  Rousseau would get his inspiration and models for many of those additions as he looked at photographs from magazines.  To look at his paintings, you’d think he spent a lot of time in jungles, but not so!

Surprise

Fight Between a Tiger and a Lion

Two Monkeys in a Jungle

The Waterfall

Here are Mahayla and Caleb’s attempts at a Rousseau jungle painting…

We actually tried to pick leaves that looked jungle-like and roll over them with painted brayers to make prints, but it didn’t work very well.  Instead, the kiddos just decided to paint with brushes.

Olga’s Gallery

The Mount Sainte-Victoire

Still-life with Apples

House and Trees

Boy in a Red Waistcoat

Lesson Ideas

Cezanne Still-life

Another Still-life Idea

Math Lesson for Older Students

Cubism Lesson

Books We’ll Read

A field of wildflowers can move me, while a single wildflower observed closely makes me marvel at the constant, yet diverse design that makes a flower a flower.  And to think that wildflowers are “planted by God” reminds me that He cares about me enough to bring me flowers!

I have posted at Shining Dawn Books about this week’s identification walk.  I hope you’ll take a minute to hop over there and read An Abundance of Wildflowers as it’s somewhat of a continuation of this post.

Last week, we took a very up-close and personal look at wildflowers through comparisons and dissection.  There was no long nature walk involved – only long enough to collect several flower samples to bring back inside.  Since the yard wasn’t off limits for picking, the kiddos brought in a couple of flowers that aren’t considered wild.  No matter, it made for a great opportunity to discuss the difference between the two!

The first activity was to compare two completely different flowers for similarities and differences.  This is another of the notebooking pages that comes with the Wonderful Wildflowers NaturExplorers unit.

The second activity was flower dissection to identify all the parts of a flower.

We own a very old dissection kit that made the dissection not only easy, but exciting for the kids.

We were able to see the ovules (eggs) in the ovary on this hollyhock (not a wildflower).

Eli always gets in on the action!

The third activity was drawing the cross-section of a flower and labeling all the parts.

And the final activity was to complete a watercolor still-life of wildflowers.  We have been studying Cezanne, who painted several still-life works, so this tied art and nature study together quite well.  And to get composer study in the mix, we listened to a CD of Chopin (our composer of the month.)

“Wildflowers in the Rain”

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