Mommio: Art Class

It's been a few weeks since we had art and music class because our friends, the Weaver's, have been away on a trip to California.  But two weeks ago we did have an art class that I forgot to post about!  We have been studying the Renaissance period and so far all of the artists have been men, so all of us were excited to learn about a famous female artist that was busy creating masterpieces at the same time at Michelangelo, Raphael and other famous male counterparts.  Her name was Sofonisba Anguissola and she was the daughter of a wealthy Italian family in the 1500's. If you want to learn more about her you can read an interesting post about her here.  Most of our class discussion focused on the expectations for women in the world of the arts during this time in Europe.  The kids all remember from our Shakespeare studies that women were not allowed to be actors so they were already familiar with the idea. Anguissola liked to paint family settings.  We took a closer look at this painting of her three sisters playing a game of chess.

We discussed the amount of detail that she included in her painting (look at the chess pieces and the beading on the dresses) and the way she contrasts dark and light colors to make things stand out more in the picture.  Our project for today was to work with the idea of dark/light contrast.  First we drew colorful pictures on white paper using oil pastels.  

 Next the kids painted over the top of the entire paper with black tempera paint.

 After the paint dried they used the edge of a knife to scrape off the paint that was over the oil pastel, leaving the black over the rest of the paper.

And the finished masterpieces-

 For homework they will all make one more picture using the same technique.  Next time we meet for art class (in a few more weeks) we will be learning about Albrecht Durer and spend a couple of lessons learning the art of printmaking.