Famous Artist: Monet

Monet is one of my favorite artists so I really enjoyed showing Goofy his works of art & learning about him together. Here are some famous Monet’s you may recognize:

     

 

I remember going to the Musee d’Orsay with my Dad growing up to see all the beautiful Impressionist paintings. I was always loved the beauty of his outdoor scenes he loved to paint. His pictures are beautiful printed in books, but there is nothing like seeing them in person! Then you can appreciate the Impressionist style better. Find a Monet in a museum near you.

We continue to use this wonderful program called Child-size Masterpieces to play a memory-type game with famous artwork. The program uses museum quality postcards of famous artwork. The kids match them up first with the exact same picture, then by artists, and eventually by genre. There are I believe 6 books and each adds to the complexity. By the time the kids finish they will be familiar not only with a variety of artwork, artists, and styles, but will be able to match artists to their artwork.

We completed the Monet activities in our study of famous artists – a lapbook from Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler. The resource is FREE! We include in our lapbook a picture of our artwork in the famous artist’s style so that Goofy remembers better who the artist is & his style.

We read good books, the start of any lesson for us! Some simply showed Monet’s work with a couple phrases, others were told like a story so the kids understood who Monet was, all of them were filled with beautiful impressionistic Monet art!

Monet made lots of pictures of his water garden in  Giverny – the water & bridge, lily pads, etc.. So we decided to make our own Monet. We made our masterpiece on canvas (just like great artists!!) We tore up pieces of dark blue, light blue, light green, and light purple tissue paper. Goofy then glued them (making sure to overlap them to get the Impressionistic look) to the canvas.

We then made lily pads by using a cup as a guide and cutting out a triangle from it. We then crumpled them up a little & glued them to our masterpiece. We made larger crumbled white flower with light pink glued in the center.

Here is Goofy’s finished masterpiece! I LOVE it! It looks very cool and true to what we were trying to achieve.

We also tried painting just like Monet – with oil paints. Goofy loved mixing the colors (what better way could there be to learn about color combinations)!! He made two masterpieces: Monet’s water garden and the train in the Paris train station with the smoke all around it. It was a lot of fun & memorable too!

To see more of our Famous Artist Series click here.  To see our field trip to the Smithsonian National Art Gallery click here.