Mini Monets

Greetings Parents!

For the last project in Lines and Shapes, I chose a collage picture as another way to review the different types of line and the differences between geometric and organic shapes. We began by reading the book Snippets, A Story About Paper Shapesby Diane Alber. This is a book about how a Red Square does not see how an Organic shape, Snippet, can be part of his perfectly geometric collage picture. Snippet makes him see that shape pictures do not just have to use the same geometric shapes, but shapes of all kinds and sizes. Then I introduced the collage art of Henri Matisse. Matisse was a French painter who became ill when he was older and was confined to a bed. Matisse still had the desire to create, so he began to draw with scissors and make paper cut outs. Sometimes Matisse had an assistant who painted paper for him so that he could cut into organic shapes, usually nature related, and then she would arrange them on the wall for him to see. Once she arranged them for him to his liking, he then glued them in place on paper. Next, I showed his collage, The Parrot and the Mermaid. In this collage, Matisse uses different organic shapes that are leaf and plant like. We played I Spy to find the Parrot and the Mermaid as well as talk about what types of organic shapes we saw in the collage. I gave each artist a large sheet of blue paper and smaller pieces of construction paper for the artists to cut organic shapes on. Each artist was allowed to choose their own colors for their collage and they began to create paper cut outs.

For the second class, I showed a youth art education video series called “Art with Mati and Dada.” We viewed the part of the video where Mati and Dada talk with Matisse and he tells them about his collages. Next, we looked at the collages, “The Sorrow of the King” and “Le Gerbe.” We then continued to add to our collages to fill the paper and, if time permitted, added a border by cutting lines out of our paper.

The objective of this project is to use a variety of tools safely and appropriately to create art.  In November, we move to the Colors and Values Session. During this session, the curriculum focuses on color mixing and color groups such as primary, secondary, and warm/cool colors.