Painting our Monet Inspired Houses of Parliament

Appreciating Monet’s Impressions of light on water

Houses of Parliament by Monet

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.

Sketch very basic outlines

We used sponge brushes to wash the sky, water and buildings.

Washing the backgrounds

Sponge wash the background

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.

Short brush stokes of colours

Once the sky and water was “done”, we painted the buildings.  We used mostly blacks and purples and blues.

Adding the black and purple strokes to buildings

And here are our completed paintings of Monet’s Houses of Parliament ~

Painting by Miss.L 8-years old

Mom's painting

Miss.K 10-year-old

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!