Paul Klee Cubism Castles!

Paul Klee with 3rd Grade

Today was my last art lesson with my 3rd graders of the school year! :( So crazy! I'm glad it was a fun one!! Read on to see how we made these beautiful Paul Klee inspired castles!

I showed them a slideshow of Klee's more Cubist pieces, and as always, asked the kids to use their powers of observation to practice analyzing art.   It was the last art lesson I taught them this year, so by now they're getting good at this. They surprise me sometimes with the things they notice - "It's like, abstract, but you can still see buildings some places", "He likes to put bright colors next to more boring ones", "He has a theme of a color and then puts a few other random colors with them, like mostly purple and blue, but then some random yellows". Aw, brilliant! Kids can analyze art, you just have to give them some vocabulary and let them do it.

ALL YOU NEED: Orange paper and oil pastels!

• To make our Klee Castles, we talked about Geometric vs. Organic shapes. 

• Then, we talked about what kinds of things we might see on a castle. 

• Then, on orange paper, kids drew their castles with pencil, using rulers to make straight lines.

• Then, they broke their castles up into smaller geometric shapes. 

• Then, they filled in each shape with a different color of oil pastel.

• Finally, all their shapes were outlined with either black or dark blue oil pastel. 

AREN"T THESE SO AMAZING?! I loved how they turned out :) Have fun!!!

Paul Klee Inspired Self Portrait Lesson

Art Teachers loooove to do self portraits with kids.  This was a cool twist on the self portrait AND it involves art appreciation AND is much easier to clean up and set up than paint.  Perfect! Read on if you wanna do it too. 

You will need:

- white paper (duh)

- sharpies

- newspapers or something to protect desks from said sharpies

- bleeding art tissue paper, cut into small squares (craft stores)

- 1 or 2 spray bottle(s)

Lesson:

1.) Introduce Paul Klee...show slideshow of his work (especially ones with the colored squares).  Talk about how he was very interested in color theory - how colors relate to other colors around them. Ask kids to describe some of his paintings or share what they observed.

2.) Show how to draw a face in correct proportions. Have kids follow along with you as you draw on the board. They will draw all their guide lines in pencil. I learned about proportions of the face back in middle school and it's stuck with me. Here's a great, simple guide. 

3.) Once they have their guidelines, students trace over ONLY their features and add details in sharpie. Make sure they're not tracing their guide lines. They don't really need to erase their pencil lines, because  once the paper gets wet, they disappear. Emphasize that all the details unique to them will be what makes their portrait look like them: freckles, how they part their hair, face shape, etc. 

4.) Pass out tissue squares and have them lay them all out how they want them, thinking about Paul Klee and his experiments with color relationships. Go around and spray each piece with water once kids have them all laid out. After a couple minutes, take off tissue paper and let dry. So cute, right??

These were done by 3rd graders: