Mommio: Art Class- Degas- Impressionism

This week we started our study of the famous French Impressionist artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917).

Edgar Degas grew up in a large wealthy family in Paris in the mid-1800's.  He loved to sketch as a child and even turned his bedroom into an art studio as a teenager.  Later he went to various art schools and became interested in sketching, painting and sculpting people and animals in movement.  One of the things that set him apart from other Impressionist was that he primarily did his art indoors- not in a studio but in public places where people would come and go, like ballet studios. We will be learning more about his work that focused on the ballerinas in the next few weeks.
We looked at this video of Degas' art and talked about the themes we saw throughout.  

The kids noticed that there were a lot of ballerinas and horses (and naked ladies).  They also pointed out that Degas had people in almost all of his art and did not really do landscapes or focus on nature.

Degas believed in practicing his artwork to become a better artist and he did this by sketching variations of the same images over and over.  He filled many notebooks with sketches.  We looked through one of his sketchbooks at the Getty Museum online. Here are a few pages from the sketchbook that we looked at.

 Today the kids practiced sketching the human figure using an artist mannequin.  First they named him Tom.

We worked on moving from stick figures to human forms with shape.  We placed Tom in several different poses (mostly yoga poses) so that we could practice sketching humans in motion.  Here's Tom doing airplane.

I had the kids draw him several time in each position.  Some of the kids were not too happy with all the repetition.  Practice, practice, practice!

Here is Gabe's sketch sheet for the day.  Great job!

This lesson was in preparation for next week when we will be taking a field trip to a local ballet class to sketch the dancers in action- just like Degas did.  Later, the kids will use their series of sketches to 

paint and sculpt ballerinas.