Monet! Making an Impression

Impressions of Monet's Water Lilies

October 21, 2012
Our first art lesson!  We experimented with wet and dry materials and used Monet's painting of water lilies as our inspiration. We saw two cityscapes by Monet at the IMA.  Claude Monet was interested in how light worked.  He knew that plain sunlight could be bent and "broken" into a rainbow of colors.  Scientists were studying light to understand how and why could be broken into different colors.

Artists in the late 1800's were interested in how to use this information to make art in new and different ways.  Since there were many new and easier ways of making photographs artists no longer needed to make "picture perfect" realistic paintings.  They were free to make paintings that could comunicate the exciting "impressions" of color and light.

Monet had a house and large garden in France.  In the garden there was a large pond. Many water lilies grew in the pond.  Monet painted scenes of the pond with water lilies many times.  All of the paintings were different because the "light" was different each day.  We looked at several of his paintings on the computer.

We experimented with dry Pan Pastels using different sizes and types of sponges and even a rubber ball to put the colors on the pastel paper. Then we worked on a larger paper to create our "impression" of Monet's painting of water lilies on a pond.

Then we got out the paints and experimented with a technique called "wet on wet" water color.  We sprayed the water color paper (very absorbant paper from India) and then added lots of water to the water color pallette.  Using a large watercolor brush we dropped and moved color around the paper. We also used bubble wrap to create textures and patterns. 

Dolce Words
We whized through the first 25 words on the Dolce word list.  It was clear these words were easily recognized and understood.  And then we met Frog and Toad and found these words in the text of the first chapter of Frog and Toad Together.  We used a ven diagram to compare and contrast frogs and toads to start to understand how they are different and how they are the same.

Taking a Closer Look!
We got out the giant magnifying glass and took a very close look at a large dried sunflower.  We could see how different it was from the fresh sunflowers we saw at the beginning of school. Each large sunflower is made up of lots of tiny individual flowers this makes it a composite flower.  Each little flower makes a seed.  We could see the geometric pattern of the seeds.  We took a seed out and broke it open to find the soft inside part.  That is the part that people like to eat.  We can tie the dry sunflower to a tree or fence and watch birds, squirrels and chipmunks come by to eat the seeds.