Paul Klee inspiration

Paul Klee

This group of students are my go-to class.  I can give them any project and they consistently exceed my expectations!  

This project is inspired by the artwork of Paul Klee, who  is a known for his abstract style of painting and the use of geometric shapes.  

The Background

Last year, someone  graciously donated a box of extremely old copies of Gulliver's Travels to the Art Room, this is what we used for our collage background.   The students tore pages from the books and glued it down on a white piece of paper, which measured 4.5 x 9. 

The Foreground

Once this was dry, the students drew parallel lines on top of the text to create their structure; a building or a castle. 
Next I had them free-hand horizontal lines to make the squares or rectangles.  
We then brainstormed ways we could add other geometric shapes inside our existing shapes.  For example, if you draw an X inside a square, it will make?   4 triangles.  This was now the students focus.  They could draw X's, or diagonal lines, vertical lines,  horizontal lines, perpendicular lines to create other geometric shapes.  

  Once that was finished, they could only choose 4 colors to finish this project.  I did remind them to use the color wheel, which was projected on the wall.  This way, the students could choose colors in the the same family or contrasting colors.  They all chose well!  I knew they would! 

Finally the students, matted their artwork with again a color from their artwork and filled out the Student Assessment sheet and added a name tag for display.