Artists and Art Week 18 - Matisse Valentines

I am now teaching Artists and Art at Bear's school.  This week we focused on Matisse and his paper cut-outs.  I love Matisse, and Bear and I have done a couple of Matisse projects already.  You can find my Matisse artist cards here.

I found quite a few Matisse books.  My favorite is still the Smart About Art book called Drawing with Scissors.  I changed it up a bit as I read it to target it more to my 2.5 yr old to 6 yr old audience.

I had "saved as" a bunch of images from this site onto my laptop's hard drive and played the images as a slide show for the children using Picasa.  They loved this.  The focus for this lesson was negative shapes and the creation of contrast by using negative and positive space in the artwork.

Since there was a wide age gap, some moms and I did a bit of prep work.  We cut red and pink papers in various sized rectangles, folded them in half and drew a half heart on them.  The children were mostly be able to cut them out on their own. They glued down their hearts to create their valentine.  I didn't get a photo of any of them because I was too busy helping the littlest ones.

Cutting hearts (at home).

Today, after school, she spent 45 minutes "drawing with scissors" working on this

 and this.

If you've done any art with your child this week based on an artist or illustration style, or taught some of the elements and principles of art, or studied a musician or any other type of artist, please join the Linky.  Please remember to link back.  

Comments are appreciated, especially if you link up! 

This post also linked to stART

and to Read.Explore.Learn

and to Kids Get Crafty