Cubist in training

Hello all, we are now getting back in the swing of things after a wonderful Thanksgiving break. It was good to see my students again, and they all seemed eager to get started on their new art projects. This makes me so happy!

For this three week period before the end of the year break we will be studding Cubism, which was popular from 1907-1915. It took me many years to enjoy this movement, and now I find it to be a very important part of the art making process. I believe it takes a great artist to train their minds to be able to create something that is abstract and beautiful, it is an entirely different way of thinking. At first it seems easy to do, just throw some shapes on the paper and hope they go together well, when in fact it takes a lot of patience and practice to make those shapes look intentional. The students are just starting to figure this out.

The 1st through 4th grade classes are recreating a piece that is based off of Picasso's Three Musicians.

The objective of this project is to use geometric and organic shapes to represent the figures, and then use a simple color palette to finish their pictures. Cubist art is usually done in Grays, browns, creams and blues. It wasn't until toward the end of movement's popularity in 1912 that other colors were used. The 1st and 2nd graders were able to start their pictures this last week while the 3rd and 4th graders are going to start their pictures this coming week. Hopefully my camera will be working and I will be able to get pictures, this last week the battery was dead and I wasn't able to take any.

The Kindergartner's are going to be creating a piece based off of Picasso's Man with Sword

This project will have the students creating one figure that has a cubist style face and body. They will be starting this project this week as well because they were on a field trip this last week.

Finally the 5th and 6th grade class are working on 2 different projects, one is a practice on the computer at a website called Picasso Head http://www.picassohead.com/ The students are able to create as many pictures as they want and save them to the gallery. This will give them some ideas for their actual paper projects based off of Picasso's self portrait.

This week I will get pictures of all the projects and include them in the next post.

Thanks for reading everyone!