Mommio: Art Class- Impressionists- Cassatt

Today in art class we continued our study of Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt by doing a monoprint project found in this book:

 A monoprint is made by painting a picture on a flat tray and then pressing paper on top of the wet paint, producing a reverse print of the image on the paper. At some point in her career, Cassatt was introduced to the art of Japanese printmaking and decided to use some of those methods in her own art.  We looked at a few of her famous color prints today.

Gathering Fruit, 1893

  Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1889

Maternal Caress, 1890
Then we made our own color monoprints.  We used tempera paint on metal baking sheets.  First the kids painted a quick picture on the tray (making the paint pretty thick).

 Next they pressed their white paper onto the image.

 They lifted the paper to reveal their print.  Then cleaned their trays to start over with a new image.

 Here is a look at some of their best prints:

 Next we move on to studying Edgar Degas for a few weeks- we'll even be taking a field trip to watch a ballet class and create our own dancer artwork.