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Tuesday 21 February 2012

Van Gogh Landscape

I don't know if it's a girl and boy thing but looking at the above watercolour paintings that my Year 1 students did, it seems that it is. The ones on the left are the boys' and the right ones are the girls'. The girls tended to overdo it and layered too much colour and I can hardly see their farm house. At the end of the lesson, their table was a big mess with water and colour all over the table top. They were noisier as they painted. The boys, on the other hand, were quietly painting as they focused on what they were doing.

I actually told the students they could paint the farm house anywhere but the boys all decided to put theirs right in the middle while the girls put theirs in different places. A girl/boy thing? Maybe someone should try it out and see if they get the same results.

This lesson, by the way, was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's Landscape painting below:
Vincent van Gogh's Landscape with Carriage and Train in the Background Painting


2 comments:

  1. Assalamualaikum.
    How do you instruct the children on this. Do you demonstrate? Would like to try this with my boys Insha-Allah.

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  2. Wa alaykum salam,

    These are the instructions (I would demonstrate as we go along):
    1. Draw two lines across the middle of the paper (approximately). This will be the road.
    2. Above the road, about halfway, draw another horizontal line and on top of this draw some mountains.
    3. Divide the foreground (in front of the road) into 3 sections by drawing 2 vertical lines. Do the same for the section behind the road but in front of the mountains.
    4. Ask children to draw in a farm house in any of the sections.
    5. For the remaining sections, draw in horizontal or vertical lines (for the fields of vegetables).
    6. Children choose 2 colours for each section and proceed to paint in a stripy pattern.
    7. Next they paint in the rest of the picture.
    8. REMEMBER, it's up to them how they want their road to slope or not, what their mountains will look like, where they want to place their farm house, whether each section will be horizontal or vertical and the colours they use. This is where their creativity comes in. We just provide the scaffold, the bare structures, but they supply the details.

    ReplyDelete

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