Second graders will learn about Georges Seurat and the art technique called pointillism in this lesson. Hopefully they will be inspired and will enjoy making their own pointillism painting!
Georges Seurat was an artist who lived in Paris, France in the late 1800’s. He started to explore the science of optics and color in his artwork and developed the style of Pointillism. Instead of mixing colors together on a paint palette or canvas, he experimented with creating tiny dots of color next to each other on a canvas. This would trick your eye into mixing the colors together to form the picture. When you look at Seurat’s paintings up close you can see all the tiny dots and individual colors, as you move farther away, your eyes blend the colors together and you can see the image as a whole.
This is one of Georges Seurat's most famous paintings. "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte" completed in 1884. This painting took 2 years to finish!
Here is a brief video you can play at the beginning of the lesson for the students to learn a bit about Georges Seurat and to see a few of his famous paintings.
Supplies needed:
Half sheets of mixed media paper (there should be a bin of paper that is cut for you, it will be about the size of a normal 8x11 sheet of paper) I did the example on the full sized paper and it took me forever!! ;) half sheets will be plenty for them!
Pencil
Paint palette with two shades of blue, two shades of green, yellow, orange, pink and purple
Q-tips, at least 10 per student, they may need more as they work
*Be aware that this dot technique does take some time and anticipate this project to take the whole class time. Try to keep the project moving along and if they aren't completely filling in all of the white spaces, it's ok. Just move on to the next section and keep going!
1. Have students write their name and teacher’s name on the back of their paper. Turn the paper over and draw an arch on one side of the paper that will be one of the hills.
2. Draw another arch for the other hill.
3. Now draw a third arch in between the two hills that will be the base for the sun.
4. Now draw lines coming out from the sun that go all the way to the edge of the paper. I drew 7 lines, but I would recommend drawing 8 lines... that way the sections on the horizon will be the same color (either both can be sky or both can be sun rays). Mine turned out ok but I would like it better if it was symmetrical! ;)
5. Now we are ready to start our pointillism technique! Lightly dip the q-tip into the paint and dot it on the paper. First we will do a few flowers scattered on the hills. Start with pink and make a few clusters.
6. Now pick up a different q-tip and fill in the clusters with dots of purple.
7. You don't want too much white showing through, so decide which color you want to fill in the spots with.
8. Now we will move on to filling in the grass! Lets start with the darker color of green and then move to the lighter color.
9. Continue making dots all over the hills with the two different greens. You can switch back and forth but just keep doing dots to get the look of pointillism. Don't spread the paint around with the q-tip as tempting as it is! :)
10. Next we will plan out which colors we will paint the sky. You will want the sky to have an alternating pattern of blue sections for the sky and yellow sections for the sun. Make a couple of dots of the color each section will be so you don't get confused or accidentally color in the wrong color on a section.
11. Decide which section you want to work on first and start dotting! You can start with either the darker color or lighter color. You may go back and forth between the colors or layer over a bit to get most of the white spaces filled in.
The finished product! Note how this example has one section that has sun rays on the horizon and one section is blue sky ;)
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