The Mom I Want to Be

This weeks open ended art project theme is “Matisse”.  It’s a new thing; Open Ended Art will feature a specific artist once a month.  We read “When Pig-Asso met Moo-Tisse” and “Drawing with Scissors” as well as checking out some Matisse art on the internet to get familiar with his work.

^^ THIS is how almost all of my progress shots came out this week.  Yay?

To get started, and show him a bit about the collage work, I first cut a bunch of “matisse inspired” shapes and let him do a collage with those. 

I realize that I am biased, but didn’t he do an amazing job?  I didn’t cut the pieces with any kind of picture in mind at all.  And here we have “Mommy Watches Two Baby Birds”.  I really love how this one came out.

After that, I handed over paper and scissors and asked him to make his own shapes for another collage work.

This are the *only* process shot that isn’t all screwed up, and you can’t see very much.  Sigh!  He cut a lot of long wavy strips, glued several together in bunches, and then attached the mini-collages to the paper.

 

I loved this project.

I started by telling her we were going to study Matisse, an artist, and that she was going to get to see his pictures on the computer.

I told her how he used to paint, but got sick and was confined to his bed. Since he couldn’t paint, he used his scissors to cut out his pictures.
I told her that Matisse liked bright, contrasting colors.

I then showed her a color wheel online and explained that colors opposite on the wheel are called contrasting or complimentary colors.
We looked at the various pairs of colors she could choose
and she chose violet and yellow.
We moved to her art table and I started cutting
organic shapes
for her, explaining that Matisse used lots of organic shapes in his collages and that organic meant that the shapes had lots of curves and few, if any, straight lines.

Then I cut some negative shapes and I explained about
negative and positive shapes.

Bear busied herself glueing the pieces where she wanted on her yellow paper.
She made one piece overlap, so we talked about what that word meant too.

She enjoyed the process so much that she wanted to do another.
We went back to the color wheel and this time she chose blue and orange as her complimentary colors.

This time, Bear became Matisse and cut some of her own shapes.
As she cut mostly rectangular pieces, I cut some organic shapes for her and I mentioned that now she would have contrast of shapes too – rectangular ones and organic ones.

Why this was a great project:
It was a fantastic vocabulary lesson.
Bear was able to tell me that a circle wasn’t organic and neither was a square.
She could point out the negative shapes and tell me they were the empty ones. Best of all, she was all excited to tell everyone she did a Matisse activity (she calls everything an “activity” these days!).