2010: Art Project 2--Delaunay

I was inspired to do this week's project based on this post at Art Projects for Kids. Although Kathy was just selling it as a mural idea, I figured it wouldn't be hard to adapt it for the art journal. The project centered around a French artist named Robert Delaunay. He was part of the Cubist and Expressionist movements. And made cool abstract art like this:
We talked about what we saw in the picture: Circles. Big circles, little circles, overlapping circles. I also introduced the concept of complementary colors. Delauney liked to use complementary colors in his work. And color in general was a huge part of his images. So I made a quick color wheel showing the girls that the color opposite each one was a "color pair". I figured color pair was easier for them to grasp then complementary. I made little box pairs one red/green, one blue/orange and one yellow/purple.

I gave them each a paper cup, a plastic bottle cap, and I had a large can of French Fried Onions (you can find whatever you want in your house of varying circle sizes). The girls drew concentric circles on their page wherever they wanted. And then proceeded to color it all in.

Here's what we ended up with:

Above is Ella's finished product

And here's is Lily's. Lily especially liked this project.
I think she could fully grasp what we were doing and that circles were "easy" for her to do.

Coming up: a Fourth of July project next week and a couple "Where in the World is Andrew?" posts.