Picasso and Pointillism

Alright - Valentines Day is over, Report card season is coming to an end (finally), and tomorrow is the last day for clubs (yes, my school has clubs and I am in charge of cooking this semester - not the easiest club with Grades 1-3 :) - time for some blogging!  There have been many art projects that I've done in the past month or so that I've been super excited about and have been dying to share!  

Let's start with some obvious ones.  Picasso and pointilism.  These are two projects that I feel are necessary for students to have had at least once in their elementary years of art...but also time consumin.  Sometimes, they feel over done - but perhaps that's more of the teacher's view than the students.  

I worked on Picasso portraits with Grade 5.   I had the students draw a pencil sketch of their own portrait while looking at a mirror.  We went through the steps of how to draw a face, what goes where, and how to make it with the best proportion possible.  We then looked at different Picasso drawings, specifically looking at the abstraction, bright colours, and cubism used. Keeping this in mind, they drew their face again, except disoriented it, the way Picasso would have. I don't think I did as good of a job as I could have in teaching the students how to disorient the face on their portraits (as you will probably be able to see in the end result).  It's really important at this stage to have them disorient their face step by step.  The students then painted their face with watercolour paints, only using bright colours.  Last step - outlining each section with black marker.  

Here's how some of them turned out:

Picasso Portraits - Grade 5

Pointillism was done with Grade 6.  We first discussed Georges Seurat's usage of pointillism and why pointillism was used.  I then allowed the students to drawing any picture they chose (making sure they didn't draw too much detail in their pictures, so that the pointillism wouldn't take absolutely forever) and they used markers to make their pointillism pictures.  At the beginning, they were excited and really enjoyed it.  By the end, they just wanted to be done!  It took about 3 periods...and I could tell by the end the students were just so excited to move on to a new project!  But they pushed through and the results turned out great!  Here's a few of the results:

Pointillism - Grade 6

Stay tuned for my next blog post about the most recent art projects done with Grade 6 on Advertisements and Grade 4 on Perspective!