Category Archives: shapes

Today I asked the Kindergarten classes this same question … and the answer came back a huge “YES!”  Their art work today was beyond even my optimistic dreams!  It was a perfect project for a warm Spring day … full of bright glorious color!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Before exploring our Kandinsky Style, we talked about shapes and how everything you draw is made up of different shapes just modified in your mind to tweak a little and make up the whole.  A simple example is a house … what shapes do you use to draw that house?  Rectangles for the structure, triangles for the roof, square for the windows, and so on.  We then moved on to something a little more complicated.  If you want to draw an elephant, you would start with an oval for the body adding some wrinkles and details, a tube for the nose, ovals for the ears adding wavy lines around the outside to make it look more realistic, etc.

We then talked about Wassily Kandinsky, the russian artist credited with painting the first piece of abstract art that was made up wholly of shapes.  Showing them his famous painting, Concentric Circles … we now had our theme.  I reminded them to look closely at his painting.  Did he worry about the colors mixing?  NO … it only added interest to his painting so, don’t worry about it!  I think that was very freeing for many of my art shy kinders!

We talked about how to use the tempera cakes neatly and how to keep the colors clean without too much water.  They did a great job dabbing their brushes on the paper towel and the applying the paint.  You will notice there is no black or brown … I only give those colors out sparingly and for particular projects because the project tends to lose it’s brightness and we are dealing with “mud” at the end of the project.  (:

Using 12×18 heavyweight paper, we folded our paper together in half 3x to make 8 rectangular sections to begin our shapes and concentric rings.  They then chose what shape to put in the centers of their paintings.  I encouraged alternating colors for the rings, but some had their own idea about what they wanted to do, which is great … that is what individual creativity is all about.

A little note … I also did this project in our younger special needs group and while I didn’t take pictures )-: they were also very successful.  We scaled back the project to only 4 very large sections and a limited amount of paint.  We had lots of smiles!