O'Keefe's Autumn Leaves

We're doing  lots of art work for the past few days as we've been busy with school events (no time to brainstorm for other subjects).  This work is inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's Autumn Leaves.

Georgia O'Keeffe is an American artist.  She is known for her paintings of flowers, leaves, trees and other natural forms.  Her work features enlarged objects from nature and painted as if viewed through a magnifying glass.  

So what we did first, was to splash some colors into the art paper using watercolors. Once dry I cut them into different leaf shapes.

We identified the autumn colors and used oil pastels to add textures on the leaves.

This is how it turned out.

 

 

Son loved the texturing!  He would explain why he used certain color combinations on one leaf and a different one from the other :) 

And finally, I added black paint for the veins and the outline. They turned out lovely and we compared it to the work of O'Keeffe.  He asked if we could do the shell as well, but told him we'll do that in the summer or try other objects around the house as well.  These leaves are so colorful that I'll be putting them in his window.

It would have been nice if it didn't rain for the past days as I plan that we do a nature expedition at first, observing natural objects using a magnifying before we do this activity.  But unfortunately, mother nature did not cooperate.  So if you're on the side of the world where the weather is good, I suggest you this activity first before starting the painting activity.

Happy Monday to all!

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Artist Study: Henri Matisse

Last week we tried looking into the works of Henri Matisse.

I told him that Matisse is an artist from France.  He loves to paint and later on got sick and was confined in bed. And because he loves art so much, he started using his scissors to cut paper to make pictures and paper collages.  He called this technique "painting with scissors". 

More of Matisse's biography here.

Making Organic Shapes

Because Matisse uses a lot of organic shapes, first we practice how to create organic shapes.

         

 

I realized that it was hard for him to make organic shapes than creating the geometric ones. Though he can identify organic shapes by visualizing leaves, clouds and water splatter he still could not create something 'close' to organic. We'll be practicing more on this :)

Matisse uses bright contrasting colors

Now it's time to put our little skills and knowledge to test.  I took a few art paper for him to cut into rectangle and squares. Then we draw organic shapes on the paper, cut them and place them on the squares (using the contrasting color scheme).

           

Now this is the activity my son enjoyed.  He loves cutting and gluing!

         

Well what do you think? 

Son loves Artist Study and I will compile the famous works of some artist so I can pile them in album.  So whenever we would do an Artist Study, we'll just skim through the album and select which one we would like to replicate :) 

As of the moment, we're doing A LOT of Halloween crafts so we can use them as decor inside the house.  I have a  FREE Nomenclature and Counting cards for you to use this season.  Hope you like it!

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Aboriginal Arts

You've been following me on Facebook, I've shared pictures of our work of Aboriginal arts.  This is still in line with our Australia study (Part I here). Sorry if some pictures are dark as we've been doing the activities late in the afternoon.

To start with, we talked about the Aborigines of Australia and how they use paintings or artworks to communicate.  I used our trusted iPad to check some pictures of the artworks and made my son choose which one he wanted to replicate (he wanted the turtle).

 

I also pointed out that most arts of the Aborigine people uses the technique of Pointillism.  We talked about how we can execute it using the back of pencils or using Qtips/buds. 

When we're done studying the pictures, we started making our version as well.  Here we used red background with contrasting colors for the dots.

            

Another day he asked if we could do it again.  And this time I printed out from a random Google search a ready made art for him to color.

We allowed all the artworks to dry and here's how they look like now that they're dry.  The one on the upper left is my work :)

My son enjoyed the painting, especially with animals on it.   The problem is that he doesn't like pointillism, for he gets tired after making a few dots. 

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Artist & Art Study ~ Piet Mondrian

Today we learned how to make art, the Mondrian style.  He is a Dutch artist who loves to use lines, and his famous work involves the primary colors (a good way to teach primary and secondary colors!)  My son described his work as Church windows :)

First, we read stories and facts about Mondrian and pointed Netherlands in our Europe map and identified its flag.  (This is a good way to review our Geography/Continent Study)  We used this resource from Making Art Fun.

I cut out strips of black cardstock and had my son decorate his own "doors and windows".  First he I made him use primary colors using crayons.

                

And the next one, I made him use paints in secondary colors.

              

And this is what he came up with. 

 

I love how it turned it!  I'm keeping all our works from our Artist Study so I can frame them when I have the time :) 

By the way, here's a Mondrian Song I came across the web (Forgot the link, but if you know it or own please let me know for the credits).   We sang it together while admiring his work.

Mondrian Song (London Bridge Tune)

Mondrian use lots of lines, lots of lines, lots of lines

Mondrian use lots of lines, in his paintings.

Black and white, red, yellow and blue, black, white, red, yellow, blue

Mondrian is famous for, Abstract Paintings.

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Artist Study ~ Vincent Van Gogh (Starry Night)

We concluded our Van Gogh study with Starry Night.  We previously had Sunflowers and my son had a wonderful time painting like Vincent!

We discussed about the colors.  With Sunflowers we were using bright colors... with Starry Night we're using darker shades like blue, violet and black.

 

I also paint with him :)

  

Here's my son's Starry Night rendition :)

 

Next would be either Seurat or Mondrian. I'm hoping we could do a lot of Artist Study before the school starts this fall. 

I wonder what have you been doing this summer?

Have a nice day!

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Spring Carnival

Artist Study: Vincent Van Gogh

We're doing Vincent Van Gogh this week.  I plan to give "art lesson" every week till the school starts to keep the little one busy as we decided not to let him join Summer Camp this year. 

We have this wonderful book as our reference.

First project:  painting Sunflowers like Van Gogh

Learning how to use big brushes for backgrounds and we talked about the different "strokes" in painting.

 

Here as seen on the picture below, I let him talk about the colors Van Gogh used in his painting.

 

For painting objects, we used small brushes.

  

 

His and hers :)

              

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Botany Unit: Trees and Leaves

Last week's activities. Sorry if I have to flood this post with pictures as I am short on words.

Trees in 4 Seasons

We made these wonderful trees last week and I think it deserves a post!

Materials needed:  some colored tissue paper and 4 tree trunks (cut-out from paper bags)

 

Cut the tissue paper into small pieces and crumple each.  For the trunks, glue them on a white paper or cardstock.  You might work on one tree at a time.  Such as here, we started with summer... thus the green tissue.  I also advice to use some range from light to dark colors for some accent.  My son had fun gluing the leaves on the trees!

 

Here's our winter and spring trees.  My son decorated the winter tree with some "snowy leaves" on the ground and leaving the tree almost bare.  Our spring tree is a Cherry Blossom thus the color pink.

 

For summer, we have light and dark green leaves and for autumn he wanted yellow and orange with leaves on the ground.

 

And this is how they turned out... and I love it! They all look good together!  I'll find a suitable frame for them so I could hang and display them in sitting room:)

 

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Bird Study Part II

Sharing with you the conclusion of our Bird Study Unit which we started a last week. 

You can read about the first part here.

Activities related to our study can be found here and here.

Bird's Beak.  Now this is a new activity which we didn't touch last year.  It was way advance for a 3 yrs old but now that my son can grasp complex information, I decided to introduce this to him.  I got the picture from The Visual Dictionary, it shows some of the different sizes and shapes of a bird's beak.  Based on what we have learned from our Bird Parts Definition booklet (Bird Pack), the beak or bill is used mostly for grooming, protection and how birds catch and eat their food.  Some  are long so they can catch foods in the water, some are short because they mainly eat soft fruits and some can be sharp as they are used to hunt other birds and animals.

So we used our bird figures again to examine the different beaks.  These figures are from Safari Toob and Schleich... I have been collecting them for years as my son loves animals and they're learning materials.

Bird's Feet.  We also talked about the different shapes of a bird's foot.  They are designed to be different are birds live in different habitats. Like birds living in water have webbed feet for swimming, those living in trees have sharp claws etc.  Again, I printed out the picture seen below from here.

I also used this information in our discussion. You can get this from Science Buddies.

Next, we talked about different types of birds.  The picture cards (nomenclature cards) are included in my Bird Pack which you can get from here.  We talked about the unique features and characteristics of each.

This is how we differentiate each one (see picture below).  By using a printable bird facts, we were able to learn how each one differs from another. 

You can download this file for FREE from here.

I love how my son is eager to learn about these birds! 

 

Bird's Nest.  We were supposed to make a nest out of twigs and leaves in the backyard.   But it rained for days and I had a flu bug, so we ended up making some nest indoors LOL.  

               

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