Fine Arts Class #2

Van Gogh. What a great class! We had two kids that were not here last week, and so we got to do a bit of catch up. But once we were done with that, we spent a lot of time talking about texture and quickly moved on to different kind of texture from the paint on the canvas.

Texture that makes your eyes move a certain way, makes you feel a certain thing is in front, or in the back of the picture. Texture that allows your eyes to see movement when there is really no movement there. We talked about the differences in doing this. Talked a bit about pointillism, and then about the way Van Gogh used dashes in a similar way, but he had more movement in his pictures than the Pointillists. He could make you sense the sun shining down. The actual movement of the sun shining and where it went. The wind moving... and the paint showed the wind moving branches or even sometimes the air.

We read the book Camille and the Sunflowers and looked at the pictures that Van Gogh painted of Camile and his family in a art book, and we noticed how he used color to show sun, or even candlelight on their faces. We noticed how he used blue, red, green, and pink in the skin of the family members to show their features with vivid detail. And we noticed the texture behind the people in the pictures. The lines and the dashes, the marks that made it feel as though the person was the only thing in the room standing still.

We then looked at Starry Nights in the same way. Looking for what stood still in the picture. What was in the foreground, and how many layers that Van Gogh used to paint the picture.

Then we started putting our pen to paper.

First I put the different texture concepts we were going to use up on the board so they could see the dashes done in this manner. (This ditto and this part of the lesson came directly from Meet The Masters.)

Then we got out our pastels and started working with color. The kids had TONS of ideas on how you could show light and texture with the colors they were using. It was really neat to see all of the variations.

They spent over an hour on their creations. Picking specific points to make as stars... different colors to make the wind. It was beautiful. They are such great children. I am so happy I get to share this beauty with them.

Logan woke as they were finishing and I didn't get to take more pictures. But their work was all beautiful... and all VERY unique. It was an amazing class.