Seurat's Dots

          After showing my class Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon, I wanted to have the class try a kid-friendly version of pointillism.  We first talked about how large the actual painting is (almost 7' x 10') and that it took Seurat over 2 years to complete. We decided to make something much smaller (about 4" x 4").



           I taped a heart under the piece of paper the child was working on (so he or she  could see the heart but there wouldn't be lines on their finished paper).

Although you can't tell from the picture, there is a black-line heart in a square under this piece of paper.

The kids were to use q-tips to fill in the heart with one color and then use other colors to fill in the box around the heart.  Not really pointillism, but I thought they could at least see how the dots combined to make a shape. For many of the children this was too tedious or hard.         As with most projects the kids do, I like to see the whole group together. Even in this project, their personalities came through (although I would have been wrong in a few of my predictions about who would do this well). The project was successful in that, over a week later, the kids remember Seurat's name and that he painted with little dots.  If I do this next year, I think I will let them try to paint a small garden with the q-tip dots.

When they are grouped together, you can find a heart in quite a few of the paintings. PS- There is still time to enter the giveaway for the $50 gift card.  Starbucks Giveaway