Mimicking the Masters- Jackson Pollock

Oh no she didn't.

Oh yes I did! 

Decided to attempt Jackson Pollock in the dead of winter with an energetic bunch!

Am I crazy?

More than likely yes.

To do this I made six stations.

Station #1 they painted the corner of a board and did straight lines where ever they felt like.

Station #2 was a marble roll. They painted 2 marbles and let them roll around like a pin ball machine all over their canvas which was placed in a shoe box. Unfortunately there is no picture of this....sigh.

Stations #3 & #4 were a combined effort. One got to use a medicine dropper to sling or drip really watered down paint while the other got to use a stick to sling or drip paint. These are both methods that Pollock used except instead of a medicine dropper he used a turkey baster. One of the many things he stole from his kitchen to sling paint.

Station #5 was guarded by me at all times. Kids got to paint a hand mixer no it will not be taking up residence in my kitchen it is specifically for art purposes only. Their canvas was laid in the bottom of a large box and when they were ready they plugged in the mixer, held it down in the box, closed the lids as much as possible and called Fire in the hole! To which they would turn on the mixer and sling paint.

Station #6 which sadly there is no picture of..... I took a cardboard shoe box that had preciously held boots and put rubberbands around the top and bottom with the lid open of course. This made a guitar like instrument. The kids put their canvas in the box under the rubber bands, painted the rubber bands, closed the lid slightly and used their fingers or a stick to pull the rubber bands and let them sling the paint on the canvas.

After doing one round of the stations they let their paintings sit by the heater for a bit while we tried to watch a short documentary which can be viewed here about Pollock until technology failed me and my computer refused to unfreeze. Story of my life.

After a snack and stalling while our paintings dried a bit we did one more round in the stations and called these masterpieces complete!

Mimicking the Masters- Van Gogh Starry night

Starry Night is on my bucket list to see in person. Gosh I just love Van Gogh. I got to see an exhibit of all his sketches while I was in NYC many years ago and it just made me want to see his paintings even more. 

This was a lesson I had been wanting to attempt for quite sometime and like the Warhol lesson couldn't find a tutorial I would call thrilled with so this is the first lesson I ever completely winged (if that is a word) because I had the general idea of the steps we'd take but I wanted to it be spontaneous and see what worked. 

I typically don't let kids dive straight into painting when they come but I knew this one would take all of our two hours so I had everything laid out ready to go. 

We started with a dry brush doing circles for the stars & moon. Then going around them in light blue followed by darker blues. Next adding our swirls. I stressed not to glob on the paint but to be spread it around so it looks messy and dries more quickly. 

This is what they looked like with most of the underpainting complete.

Then we started doing lots and lots and LOTS of dashes! I gave the girls freedom to mix their colors to create new shades of blues and yellows and mix they did! It was at this point I knew they were going to turn out amazing!

As the layers and layers of dashes piled on it made their paintings so interesting, check out this moon!!!

Once parents arrived we were all dashed out but I was beyond thrilled with their results!

SO proud of how the girls did, this will definetly be a repeated lesson!

Mimicking the Master- Andy Warhol

I've wanted to do a Warhol lesson for a while but couldn't find a tutorial or lesson that I liked because most were either completely computer generated or were just a sketch the kid drew then painted. Since I wanted their paintings to turn out looking like them, I went to Hobby Lobby browsing for some way to get a picture from copy paper to a canvas. Enter Transfer Paper!

It has lead all on one side of a sheet and you can trace any thing you like to transfer it onto something else! 

I had previously taken mug shots of the students and edited them in Picassa to turn them into drawings so we had more defined lines. We used 16x20 canvases and laid the transfer paper down with the picture on top and traced their image four times.

They then went back and went over their lines in sharpie.

After that they used neon paints and neon paint pens for the smaller areas. I gave them the option of doing each face the same colors like Warhol's 4 Marilyn's or they could do every one different. Most chose to mix it up.

And I have to say their results were fantastic!

Mimicking the Masters- Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat died at the much to young age of 31. My morning class decided they know why after painting literally 1,000s of dots to create an Eiffel Tower! All those dots made him go looney! Even if Wiki said he is believed to have died from pneumonia, we know the real truth lol

Here is the painting of his that we studied. The kids noticed that it was made up of lots of tiny dots and we discussed that this type of art is called Pointellism. 

We started out by playing with qtips and paints by trying out different combinations of colors to show that you can make colors lighter or darker by the choice of color you select.

Then after sketching the Eiffel Tower they very lightly drawer it on the canvas. After that the q-tips set to work.

We focused on creating highlights and shadows with our choice of colors.

Many, many, many, many dots later.....By the end of the two hours we ditched the q-tips and started using our finger tips to fill in the last of the white areas! 

This was a SUPER helpful blog with this lesson! Check it out!

http://www.thebloomprintproject.com/blog/2013/10/30/seurat-eiffel-towers