Impressionism: Mini Monets

When I decided to teach the kids a bit of art history and introduce them to different techniques, I found a trove of awesome ideas on different websites. On several of the projects we've done, I can wing it when I introduce the ideas. Other times, I want to try the project out ahead of time to make sure it works. Back in the 80s I remember having Shrinky Dinks -- I think that was the brand-name of the project kits that had shrink film that we would color then bake. This project was similar to those. The purpose was to make a picture with several colors of small strokes so that, upon shrinking, the colors would blend nicely like an impressionist painting.
A few weeks ago, we read some kids' art history books and flipped through some of the museum art books that had art by Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cassett, to name a few. Next, each of the kids chose a photograph or an illustration in a magazine to "copy". We taped a piece of (mostly) clear shrink film to each of their photos and they used colored pencils to color their own version. Maddie changed up some of the colors in her photo because, as she started, "I am a real artist, not a copier." Will caught on to the plan and his art ended up looking like himself. Jon and Ben decided to randomly decorate their film, and that worked fine, too. We baked the film for about 3 minutes and it shrunk, condensing the print, but concentrating the color. Our plan is to attach magnets and make pretty art-holder-uppers for the fridge. I had a lot of fun making these, too. Since there was hardly any mess, and the kids enjoyed the magic of the shrinking art, we will probably do these again soon.

Here are the results and all artists were thrilled! The first (mostly orange) is Ben's, the next two are Jon's (green background and white with hearts), Maddie's has a red background and purple faces for her and her cousin, Will's looks like Will, and I did one of my dad and another of Silas.

Dick Blick, an art supply company, has some outstanding lesson plans if you ever need ideas and supply lists. Some of the plans even have video lessons and I can spend hours learning how to do new techniques. Here is a link to the project we did: http://www.dickblick.com/lesson-plans/mini-monets/.

Some of our favorite kid art books for this project include:

Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers and Swirly Stars (Bucks & Hubb, 2001) - Smart About Art series

Claude Monet: Sunshine and Waterlilies (Packard & Kelley, 2001) - Smart About Art series
Babar's Museum of Art (Brunhoff, 2003)