Paul Klee (Fourth Quarter Artist Study)

Woah, did I drop the ball on our artist studies this past year.  We've done one so far, and that was because I really didn't want to school year to end without having done any.  But the beauty of homeschooling the way we do it, is that it's never really over, and we already have our next batch of books on their way from the library so that we can continue on into the summer :)  

Last month we had quite a bit of fun looking into Swiss-born painter Paul Klee (pronounced "clay").  He was the first very abstract painter we had studied, so it was interesting to get the kids' take on his intentions and artistic suggestions.

The books we read were...

Paul Klee (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists), Mike Venezia
Paul Klee for Children, Silke Vry

The Cat and the Bird: A Children's Book Inspired by Paul Klee, Geraldine Elschner

                 

Our "prints" were from calendars from calendars.com   (as always!)

And we did two projects, one inspired by Klee's painting "Castle and Sun" (we used oil pastels)....

I used this Pinterest-found project for inspiration.

And another was sort of a mash up of his works "Cat and Bird" and "Head of Man" (with chalk pastels).....

I used this "tutorial" for creating the face.  It's on Pinterest, but links to nowhere :( 

And I'm proud to announce that today we started a little Degas study (the boys are very suspicious of all this ballerina stuff and infinitely prefer his paintings of horse races ;) )  and soon we'll be cracking open our Gustav Klimt calendars.  So like I said, summer makes up for all sorts of opportunities lost during the actual school year ;)  

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I occasionally Pin projects I find that will fit into our "home brew" artist studies.  You're welcome to follow my Art for Kids Pinterest board and you'll most likely have a sneak preview at what we'll be doing next.... ;)