Friday Art Feature - Mingling with Monet

YAY for Fridays!!! This week was a CRAZY week, so I wanted to instill a little calmness into the classroom. And what did I do to achieve that calmness, you ask? Well, I broke out the paints, of course. Paint used to be the one art supply I dreaded - paint meant mess.period. However, I've been pretty impressed with how careful my students have been with the paint this year. Yes, we still have messes ... but they have learned to take responsibility to clean up these messes, and sometimes I don't even know about the messes (even better).

With our provincial testing, year-end assessments, track meets, and everything else we squeeze into the last two months of school, I haven't spent much time on visual arts. I missed it. So we made up for it this week. Life is good again.

This week we were mingling with Claude Monet in art class. I was inspired by a pin I saw on Pinterest and followed it back to the cutest project at The Crafty Classroom. I love Monet's water lily paintings with the Japanese bridge - I even have a print in my bedroom. So, when I saw this art project months ago, I knew we had to try it.

We started off by taping a bridge across our papers (I used heavy duty card stock - I prefer to use card stock when we are painting). We only had masking tape to use, but if I do this project again, I will use painter's tape as I found the masking tape a little too sticky (and with the horrific humidity this week it was not a good combination).

Related:Falling Leaves in Art Class

We got out our painter's palettes (a paper plate) and using plain old acrylic paint from the dollar store, we started mixing greens and blues and yellows and just about any other colour they wanted. (I had a picture of Monet's original projected onto the Smartboard so they could see what it looked like).

I instructed the students to use a medium sized brush, and just "dab" the paint onto the paper over and over - with the dabs overlapping. They needed to "dab" right over the fence and pretend it wasn't even there. I told them to mix their paints in a way that the bottom of the page was darker (a greeny-blue colour for the water), moving to a lighter greeny yellow for the top of the page (the sun poking through the trees). When the paint had dried a bit, they went back and added some water lilies at the bottom (still using the dabbing technique).

The next day, once the paint had dried, we (carefully) removed the tape ... and stood back in awe of our masterpieces! We added a little shading with some grey paint, and stood back to admire again! Can you believe these were made by 10 and 11 year-olds? FANTASTIC!!!