Mommio: Art Class- Post Impressionists- Georges Seurat

Today in art class we learned about another inventive Post Impressionist artist, Georges Seurat (1859-1891) from our Artistic Pursuits curriculum.

Seurat was a French painter who invented his own method of painting using small points of bold color placed carefully next to each other to fill in the canvas and create a picture.  This form of painting is called pointillism.  Seurat was inspired by scientists during his time who were studying optical mixing, the idea theory that colors look different depending on the colors they are next to.  If you place blue dots and yellow dots together they appear to be green, red and yellow dots together may appear to be orange, etc.  Seurat did not mix colors to create new ones, instead he placed strong primary colors next to others to create the color effect he wanted to achieve.  We read a book that Marney found at the library this week about modern artist Josef Albers.  He also studied color and how colors interacted with each other by painting squares of color on top of each other.  This was a great book to show the kids how the theory of optical mixing works and they are all looking forward to studying Albers later on in our art class.

Today in class we used the Discovering Great Artists lesson on making Pointillist Color Cards to get a better idea of how optical mixing works.

First the kids were all given four white index cards, some Q-tips and 5 colors of tempera paint: red, yellow, blue, white and black.  They covered each card with red dots.
Then we let them dry so that our colors would not mix.

When the red dots were dry they added a different color of dots to each red card.

When the cards were all dry we lined them up and stood back to look at them and discuss
 the changes in color.