Self Portraits Piccaso style

We watched this cute little video about Picasso and then painted our own self portraits with a Picasso flair.

Can you see the 2 different profiles? We learned about framing the face, seeing our faces from the front and the sides. Using bold colors to make our portraits more abstract and creative. As well as filling the frame with lots of geometric shape and dimension.

Hotrod is such a distraction but we love him so. 

He loves to paw at everyone's water jars and get a drink now and then. 

Ask your students if they can express an emotion in their painting? What colors express anger, joy, laughter, happiness, fear? They will enjoy this project. There was a lot of laughs today. Our faces look funny and that is FUN!~

Artist Focus: Wayne Thiebaud

"If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective." 
~Wayne Thiebaud (Tee-Bo)

I am so excited to show off the students work this week. We learned about the Impasto techniques that Wayne Thiebaud used to create his realistic pie paintings. Impasto is the technique of applying large quantities of paint with a brush or palette knife, usually with a very gestural quality. The effect is a three-dimensional aspect to the surface. Get ready to have your appetites enticed!

The younger students saw this assignment and wanted to 
paint pies too! Here are their paintings. Wow!

Great work! Now...I'm going to go have dessert!

Artist Focus: Eric Carle

We took pieces of typing paper and did big swashes of color. Then we took old credit cards and cut notches in the edges so we could 'comb' over the wet paint and create designs. Then we cut out our collage butterflies using all the different vibrant pages of colors. The results were fantastic. We may have to do this again! We had a blast! (If we do it again I will have them paint the backgrounds too!) Enjoy this new technique and try some at home. Post some of your own!! 

Artist Focus: Franz Marc

Franz Marc was the most popular of all the German Expressionists.

He was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-century. He founded a new program for art based on exuberant color and on profoundly felt emotion portrayed with color. 

Franz Marc was born on February 8, 1880, in Munich, Germany. He studied at the Munich Art Academy and traveled to Paris several times where he saw the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists. Tragically, Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-six, but not before he had created some of the most exciting and touching paintings of the Expressionist movement.

Using vibrant color and copying Franz Marc's originals gave the 

students great exposer to this artist and the Expressionist techniques. 

What do you think?