Appreciating Monet’s Impressions of light on water
In our series of Impressionist painters, we started our first study of Monet.
We have enjoyed Charlotte Mason’s approach of art appreciation ~
- We read a brief biography about Claude-Oscar Monet and viewed a lovely slide show of his works. Visit claudemonetgallery.org for more of his works in a slide show.
- Then we looked at some more paintings in our coffee table book on Impressionists.
- The girls will narrate a biography on our Famous Impressionist Artists Biography Pages.
- I have created lovely minibooks to add to our Impressionist Lapbook/ Notebook.
- We zoomed in and looked in detail at an excellent online picture of Houses of Parliament at artchive.com.
- Next, we painted Monet’s famous Houses of Parliament.
Here’s what we did ~
On a large A3 size page, draw a horizontal line about 1/3 from the bottom of the page. Outline the buildings and lightly sketch the sun’s position.
We used sponge brushes to wash the sky, water and buildings.
Using paint brushes and short dabs of paint, we used the colours and the diagonal angles that Monet used to paint his sky. We used those same colours and horizontal brush stokes to colour the water. We painted the sun yellow and added the vibrant orange stokes to the sky and the reflections in the water. Key to the success of this technique is to use small stokes and leave spaces between the dabs of colour. We added purples and greens and blues until the sky and water looked like Monet’s.
Once the sky and water was “done”, we painted the buildings. We used mostly blacks and purples and blues.
And here are our completed paintings of Monet’s Houses of Parliament ~
I often ask the kids what they liked best in their painting. They always find something they liked or enjoyed. As we looked at our paintings, we noticed how different they all were. Miss. L captured Monet’s gloomy, foggy mood and Miss.K caught the feeling and movement of Monet’s paint style.
All our works were so unique and we all enjoyed this art activity!
I am so blessed by your art projects. So far my girls and I have done 3 of the Van Gogh projects and 2 Monet. We really liked the House of Parliament project (a painting I didn’t like at first!) It has really opened up our experience of art. I hope to l do some Cezanne still life this next week. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your projects. Adding art these last few weeks has just given a dimension of creativity and joy to our school days. Thank you for sharing with someone who really needs help for art.
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A beautiful painting and a great undertaking by your class!
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These are beautiful paintings Nadene and girls – well done!!
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What a lovely project!
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I LOVE the idea of using the sponge brushes! that would be a huge help AND the sketching it out first! I’m so going to help my kids with that this time!! thanks for sharing! I’m going to try to remember to link up with you on my final post of a series of Monet artist study posts!
amy in peru
http://fisheracademy.blogspot.com
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I think they are beautiful and that a lot was learned from this activity. Great job!
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Crieky Nadene, I love your website! We’re only starting to homeschool our 5 kids from next year, but am learning as much as possible in the meantime. I get so amazed when I see the things you do with your girls, and overwhelmed at the same time at the thought of, “how am I gonna remember to do everything? What I miss NB stuff”. None the less, my confidence HAS TO rest in the fact that God will guide, lead and equip me. It’s great to see your ideas tho. Thanks for taking the (extra) time in sharing with us … you have no idea how much a newby like me appreciates it! Keep it up, asb!
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My encouragement to any new homeschooler is to start slow and add things week by week. We love art and do it gladly each week, but we don’t and can’t do it all. Life is seasonal and so is homeschooling. From time to time we change our emphasis and in the end we cover most what I had hoped we would do. Thanks for your kind comment. I hope you will find loads of things here to help make homeschooling a joy!
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I am always so impressed with what you are doing with your hs. Awesome lesson!
Ada
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