Tuesday, April 27, 2010

More Impressionism

Last week, which was the "next week" of my previous post, we surveyed a few more Impressionist artists.  (In keeping with my own personal blog rules, I do not apologize for not getting the actual post out last week.)

We took a quick look at work by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassat, Edgar Degas, Paul Gaugin and Vincent Van Gogh.  I continue to be surprised at how closely many of these artists worked together.  The often shared studio space and models (as Gaugin and Van Gogh, who sometimes had a hard time getting along as roommates in Van Gogh's yellow house), set up easels next to each other to paint the same scenes en plein air, and painted each other's portraits (take a look here, here, here, here, here, here and here).  Hmmmm...can you tell that I am fascinated by the fact that they painted each others' portraits?

We created our own Starry Nights.  Here is my whiteboard sketch to help the children with shapes and placements. 


I have spent all year trying to get the children to use long smooth strokes when drawing and painting.  Now I am trying to get them to use choppy little strokes and no blending.  We used oil pastels on regular paper for this project.


Finishing: I did a quick watercolor wash to darken the pictures a bit. I did the wash for them since we were using regular paper, and the watercolor bleeds through so quickly.


Still to come: Pointellism!

1 comment:

  1. You're doing an awesome job with them. I love how they can remember the names of the artists when you ask.

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