Dabbling in art

One of the subjects I am not confident in teaching is art. I mean sure, I can put paint or pastels or other fun mediums in front of children and they'll make something. But helping them develop their skills - well, that's another story.

But today I started taking pictures of the art we've done and I thought, "This may not be fantastic, but it's fun." One of the things we've started lately is doing an artist study, though quite slowly. Once a week we pull out a painting by Monet (I printed some off the internet) and we talk about it. They seem to enjoy this, mostly. Then we either try to make it ourselves, or we try to use a similar technique. At other times, we've done projects from the book Discovering Great Artists. Here's some of their work:


We tried doing watercolor on wet paper to show how the colors soften and blend, then later when it's dry doing darker colors over it. I did the umbrella for him, and Ethan added the interesting blotches in the ocean after it was dry (to see what would happen).



After reading about Van Gogh, we tried making his Sunflower painting with crumpled gouache paper and chalk pastels, over which they painted watercolor. Ethan chose black for his background. Megan, of course, chose pink.



I was surprised when Megan said she wanted to try Monet's Japanese Garden. I helped her quite a bit with mixing the colors (my kids are pretty concrete sequential - they just want to do straight up colors that are mixed well - I was trying to get them to be a little more free). I also helped her with some of the background, but the bridge is all her. :)




This is Megan's try at Waterlilies by Monet. I helped her some with the placement of the flowers, but mostly this is her work. She really enjoys painting.