We began our lesson with a reading of The Life and Work of Georges Seurat, by Paul Flux. Presenting a brief overview of his life, this picture biography hits the highlights and offers interesting tid bits about his life and art work.
After the reading, the children tried pointillism. I had printed this coloring page from Making Art Fun, and the children used markers to color the page. As an added bonus, I used this opportunity to review primary and secondary colors. Each child had three markers: blue, red, and yellow. They used these primary colors to create the secondary colors of orange, purple, and green. Pointillism is a technique which uses dots of color to create 'true' colors in a painting. By using dots of red and yellow side by side in an area, the children were able to create an area of orange.
Then we viewed A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (painted 1884-86) because we have a rather large print of this hanging in our utility room. {Doesn't everyone decorate their utility rooms with beautiful art prints? Maybe that's just us. Personally, I wanted something pretty to look at when doing the laundry.} The children are pretty familiar with the painting since they help fold the wash. Even so, we completed a picture study of it.
We finished our lesson on Seurat with our own attempts at pointillism with paint. First the children outlined a subject. Then, picked paint colors. They used cotton swabs {many} to fill in their paintings with dots of paint. Afterward, the children declared pointillism to be 'difficult,' but expressed a new admiration for Seurat's use of it and the results he achieved. {Folding laundry may have just gotten a bit more enjoyable for them as well.}
For review, a few days later, I gave each of the older children a printed copy of Making Art Fun's artist biography and their word search. It was a great way to reinforce what they had learned earlier in the week about Georges Seurat.
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