Thursday, February 25, 2016

Paul Klee lesson

This was such a great lesson! Paul Klee works so well with young artists because of his simplification of his subjects, his appreciation for children's art, his bright colors and dreamlike and imaginative paintings! We started out touching on some of the highlights from his life looking through the book, "Artists in Their Time: Paul Klee." Then I flipped through "Dreaming Pictures with Paul Klee" and had them tell me the first thing that came to mind when they saw the images. Somewhat surprisingly, they got so into this! Then we looked at or inspiration piece, Castle and the Sun: 



I said how it made me think of building blocks with my kinda and dumped a bucket of them out on the table and told the kids to get their creativity flowing by building some castles out of the blocks. My students were up to eleven years old and they all loved this. From there I gave options that divide up well into different age-suitable versions of our projects. 
The youngest student ate her paint:
The next youngest built her castle,
Traced a few blocks randomly, making most into people or monsters with people in their tummies, outlined with oil pastel with a little help and then painted with water colors on top:
The next age group built a castle flat on his paper, 
Traced his castle, block by block,
Went over his outline with a black oil pastel,
And painted each shape a different color, careful not to cross the black line. He's kinda particular about order and stuff so this project was perfect for him:
My 9 - 11 year old group built their castles and then drew them on their paper or just used them as inspiration and went through the rest of the steps like my son did:
The finished projects were pretty cool:
The second group used them as much looser inspiration. They mainly drew and outlined and then divided it up into shapes of their imagination. Different but cool:
The kids all seemed to enjoy it and I didn't hear any "I'm bad at ..." or "I can't do ..." So a definite win!

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