Art Projects Inspired by Artists

For abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock, who is famous for splatter paintings, I decided to teach a lesson focusing on LINE. The project involved making lines using a crayon and a washable marker to form a pattern on either a long strip of white paper or a six-inch hexagon shape. A shimmering ink Bingo dauber is used to paint over the design such that the crayon will somewhat resist the ink wash. The strips are then woven together for each classroom to make a group project, matted, and suitable for an art auction. The hexagons may be displayed like a puzzle on a bulletin board temporarily then individual pieces may be sent home with each student.

Woven Friendships - Inspired by Jackson Pollock 

Pollock Polygons

Positive-Negative Space 'Vase' - Inspired by Manet

For Realist, Edouard Manet, we studied his "Vase of Peonies on a Small Pedestal", leading to a lesson on positive-negative space. The first project involved drawing a top and bottom half of a picture (e.g. a vase of flowers) on contrasting colors of construction paper. We used dark oil pastel on the lighter-value paper and a contrasting color of oil pastel on the darker-value paper.

Japanese Notans - Inspired by Edouard Manet

The second project is equally complicated and involves Japanese Notans. We used a 12"X12" piece of white construction paper as a background, then six-inch square pieces of other colors of construction paper. Students were to cut out shapes from the square and flip them out to each of the four sides, one edge at a time. It took both patience and precision to line up the pieces along the sides of the somewhat delicate centerpiece. Spectacular!

For German and Russian Expressionists, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, my inspiration comes from Kandinsky's "Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles".

Color Wheel Sky Inspired by Kandinsky

The topic was COLOR and the project was called, "Color Wheel Sky". Students did watercolor salt paintings. Some of the results were quite unexpected, though pretty remarkable, especially with non-rainbow color schemes.

For Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, the lessons were again about color, though this time we studied warm and cool colors and contrasting colors. I'm sure you've seen the hand with the concentric lines before.

Psychedelic Hands - Inspired by Salvador Dali

To change this up, incorporate Zentangles (a.k.a doodles) and instead of tracing the hand and drawing lines trace and cut out the hands and mount them on opposite color paper. Use black marker for the Zentangles and embellished with silver gel pen. My original intent was to use the gel pens for everything, but unfortunately, it didn't show up well or achieve the desired effect, so we resorted to markers instead.

Zentangle Hand - Inspired by Dali

For Miro, who largely used the primary colors and black in his artwork, our lesson additionally included a discussion about composition. While I was on vacation, I got the idea of using discarded newspapers. It was a lot of prep work to find appropriate newsprint pages and tear them into the size I wanted. I let the students decide how much newsprint they wanted for their backgrounds, and we used black washable markers for the characteristic Miro lines with dots.

Composition on Newsprint - Inspired by Miro