Art Journal Wednesday: Project Eight

The last project we tackled this summer was mosaics! I saw this post over at No Time for Flashcards: a fantastic blog with great craft ideas, sensory activities and book suggestions. It featured this photo:
I knew I didn't just want to show the girls this picture. I wanted to tie it more to art history. So I did some googling. I first explained that a mosiac was a picture made up of smaller things put together (kind of like a puzzle) to make a bigger picture. I showed them this image first:
I knew they would recognize Starry, Starry Night from our earlier summer project. They thought this was very cool! Then I showed them a couple others:
I told them you could make something thing real like an animal or person (like above). Or you could make a design like below:
And the last thing I showed them was Hagia Sophia, a church and then mosque (now a museum) in Turkey. The inside of the church is covered in huge beautiful mosaics. When the sun shines in the church windows, the metallic quality of the mosaic tiles gives off a gorgeous golden light.


After all that, I finally showed the girls this fish mosaic:
And finally the button fish mosaic. I told them they could make anything they wanted on their paper. I had gone to Michael's and bought two medium sized bins of mixed craft buttons. I sorted them by color ahead of time. And I gave the girls stronger poster board and Glue-all. Make sure you use an adhesive that will really stick to the buttons (or whatever medium you choose to use).
They thought about what they wanted to do. Lily picked a ladybug! So I drew an outline for her and she did the rest:
Ella decided she wanted to do a design. So I helped her think through what she wanted to do. We made a big circle and divided it into quadrants. Then she went to work:
Ella loved this project sooo much she proceeded to spend the next hour and a half making more creations! She nearly used up all the buttons!

Here are her other masterpieces:




I helped her with the outline of the butterfly and ladybug (Lily used up the red so she had to do yellow). The rest she came up with all on her own! (a penguin, bee and snowman, respectively)

Art Journal Wednesday: Project Seven

A friend of mine just mentioned wanting to do some "painting ala Holly style" with her kids who happen to be on summer vacation. They are living "down under" in Australia right now and her kids just finished up school. All this reminded me that I still have two projects to post from our Art Journal Wednesday series this past summer.

This project centered on the artist Mondrian. One of my favorites! I just realized I was going to link to information about Mondrian, but I used my old art history books when I was talking about him to the girls. I just googled it and didn't find a satisfactory (to me) article. I guess Wikipedia was closest. Here is a quote from Mondrian about his work:

I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things…

I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

Of course, I didn't really explain all that to the girls. I mostly explained that some artists paint images we recognize (like a picture of a person, animal or place) and others paint "designs". That was the best way I could describe abstract painting to them without getting too technical. And then I told them that Mondrian liked to use pure colors or colors that weren't mixed with anything else and asked them if they could think of any colors that sounded like that. Ella got it immediately and said the primary colors!

I showed them these two works by Mondrian:

Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue (1920)Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-1943

The top one is pretty straight forward Mondrian. I asked the girls what the second one looked like to them. They both said "a map!" Yes! I told them that Broadway was a very busy street in New York City and that the painting represented the layout and the "busyness" of the colors were the hustle and bustle of the big city (this would be the idea of rhythm in the work).

Anyway, that was probably more indepth than I needed to get in this post. I was just so impressed with how the girls seemed to "get" some of these really abstract ideas when they were broken down simply.

For this project. I gave the girls a ruler and pencil and asked them to draw three vertical lines anywhere they wanted all the way down the page. And then three horizontal lines all the way across. Then, some smaller lines inside. Then color in what you feel like coloring in. I finished them off for them by drawing in the fatter and skinner black lines with permanent marker and a ruler.

And here's their creations:

Above: Ella's Mondrian. She really took the "pure colors seriously and
didn't use different shades.

Lily's Mondrian. She obviously used different shades
of the colors. But did a terrific job!

An English Tea Party!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I took the girls, my stepmom Clare, and my mom out for tea at Lady Elegant's Tea Room in St. Paul. It was my birthday present to Clare who really enjoys tea. And I thought it would be so fun for Ella and Lily to have a REAL tea party!

There was a photographer there from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The tea place had called me to let us know he would be there. A woman was writing an article about family getting together at the holidays and they asked if it would be all right if the photographer took a few photos of us during the tea.

Lily was petrified of him and said about two words the whole time he was in the room, which was for about half the tea. She opened up immensely once he left. The article appears in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today! Here are the photos attached to the online article: