Happy Birthday, Paul Cezanne! (On January 19th)

In honor of Cezanne's birthday, I thought I would REPOST a popular lesson from 2013 that is fun and easy and is appropriate for a wide range of students. The painting below is my youngest son's and was featured in the book "500 Kids Art Ideas" by Gavin Andrews published by Quarry Books. While this is a nice fall-inspired still life, you could change it to pears or lemons/limes for a more winter or spring theme. Either way, the results are fabulous and the lesson is chock-full of active learning.

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We are all into fall over here and I thought this week would be a nice time to do a still life with apples with my after school art class. This is the first time we've met this school year, and the group has 1st-4th graders in it. I had an idea of what I wanted to do, it's actually a combination of two lessons I saw out there:

My 1st grader's example with Cezanne's reproduction.
I can't show you the still life--he ate it!
(UPDATE: He's now in 3rd grade, but still eats still eats everything in sight!)

"Still Life With Oil Pastels and Baby Oil" (2 posts) from Fine Lines
http://kids-finelines.blogspot.com/2012/04/still-life-with-oil-pastels-and-baby.html
http://kids-finelines.blogspot.com/2012/04/oil-pastels-and-baby-oil-part-2.html

That was pretty much the lesson I used, but I modified my talk in the beginning to be about Paul Cezanne's work showing them "Still Life With Apples."

I then used the talk I found on That Artist Women: "Open vs. Closed Composition"
http://www.thatartistwoman.org/2011/09/open-vs-closed-composition.html

I really like how she shows real art examples in her post. I showed those to my kiddos as well.

Then I gave them time to experiment with arranging the apples (and one girl's donated pear) into closed and open compositions. There were three students to a table and the table needed to agree on a composition they liked best.

And then we were off! I walked them through drawing, demoed how to use the oil pastels and baby oil, and gave a quick watercolor demo.

These are their creations! Beautiful! They are so proud (me too!).

Enjoy!