Thursday, September 6, 2012

Mondrian Inspired Paintings

Today was the first day of Modern Art class at our local coop.

The kids created Piet Mondrian inspired compositions.  I like the first day to be painting, because it's so much fun.  The class is open to kids 5-8 of all art abilities so I like to cover all the basics.  Primary colors are a great place to start and next week we'll move into color mixing.




They started with using rulers to draw parallel lines in one direction on the paper with pencil.  Then they turned the paper 90 degrees and did parallel lines the other way.  Each direction was 4-5 lines.  Then, they could choose to erase or add lines within the cells they'd created to add some variety to their compositions.

Next they went over their pencil lines with crayon.  Sharpie would work equally well.



Then they were ready to use the tempera paint in blue, red and yellow.  Since I used this project to introduce primary colors, the examples we looked at were all Mondrian paintings done in primary colors.  They were encouraged to not put the same colors next to each other.  They were also encouraged to clean their brushes between color switches so they wouldn't be getting secondary colors.  They were also not supposed to fill in all the cells.

If you would like to do some Mondrian inspired artwork Art Projects for Kids blog has some ideas as well as TeachKidsArt.  This is a very accessible artist and project to do at home and can easily be modified for whatever art supplies you have on hand.  Everybody really enjoyed today and it's a small group this time, so it's easy to give everyone lots of attention.

Here's the website for the Mondrian Trust to find out more about this artist.

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