In the past few weeks in Year 1, we have been learning about different famous painters and then trying our hand at painting in the same vein as that painter. So far, we’ve looked at Paul Klee and Vincent Van Gogh.
Last half term, we looked at Paul Klee while studying the topic, Homes. We learned that Paul Klee liked to work with familiar shapes, like rectangles, triangles and squares and also that he liked to use a lot of bright colours in his painting.
For our Klee lesson, we specifically looked at Castle and Sun to act as our inspiration. The children first drew their sun at the top of the page and then started from the bottom, creating different shapes to build their castles. They then used watercolours to created their works of art.
We used Vincent Van Gogh to start to learn about our new topic, Growing and Changes. We first learned about him and then looked at some of his most famous paintings.
Did you know that Van Gogh only sold one painting while he was alive? We used his painting Sunflowers to help us investigate colour blending, using pastels. Our versions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers show movement, in the petals, as we tried to make the petals look as if they were blowing in the wind.
To begin our lesson, we step by step learned how draw sunflowers, first tracing two circle shapes and then carefully adding our petals, mainly facing one direction, to show the effect of the breeze. Later, the children got a quick lesson on how to use pastels and how to blend the different colours before adding colour and detail to their sunflowers.
While learning about sunflowers, we also found out that sunflowers chase the sun in the sky. The children were amazed to find out that it turns its face towards the sun and droops down when the sun is not out.
Please pop by and see our lovely ‘arty’ classroom!