Our Fall Art Class

You may remember me mentioning something about teaching an art appreciation class for our homeschool group's fall co-op. Well, I just had to share what my kiddos created in that class. They had a lot of fun!

The first week we talked about George Seurat and Pointillism.

I had the students use heavy art paper, acrylic paints, and cotton swabs

for this technique. They were to simply dab the cotton swab in the

paint and use dots of paint to create their paintings. The Princess

went for the landscape, while Mr. B chose fruit as his muse.

I think I'd like to try this again soon with my kids and practice mixing

dots of different colors to create another color. For not being an

artist, I do find this stuff totally fascinating!

(For instance, did you know that Seurat is basically the father of our

modern day printing technique? He thought that any color could be

created by using red, blue, and yellow. Have you looked at what

colors your printing cartridges use lately?).

The second week we talked about Jean Dubuffet and textured sculpture.

For this project my husband cut a whole bunch of wood blocks for us to

use for the base of our plaster of Paris. Then we pressed various

objects into the wet plaster to make impressions. We used shells,

buttons, Legos, screen, chain links, coins, you-name-it...

The class was finished at that point but I encouraged the students to

paint their "sculpture" after it had dried well. My kiddos chose to

paint theirs: The Princess went for a turquoise and Mr. B for red.

The Third week we discussed Jackson Pollock and splatter painting.

Each student had an 8x10 canvas to paint. Some really got into the

splatter action (see The Princess' above), but others had a more

difficult time doing that and went for a different approach--and

that's okay, too. It's all about self-expression, right? Mr. B went

more monochromatic (see below).

Our final week we learned about Alexander Calder

(my personal fave from this study) and wire art.

I finally narrowed down a project in Calder's style for our class to wire

fish. This was a fun project! I never knew wire could be so expressive.

Each student received about 18" of wire and was asked to form it into

a fish. They could embellish it with beads--or not. The Princess added

beads, but Mr. B opted for a purest approach. I love both fish!

And after four weeks of art appreciation we are now enjoying some lovely

new original art in our home!

I am looking forward to more fun art projects this year!

Comments

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