Artist of the Month: Georgia O'Keefe

For this month, let's make things BIG!

Magnifying glasses, poppies, and BIG easel paintings of small details.

I would absolutely fill the room with flowers for this month! If you are comfortable with bones too. This pairs great with desert biome study, and I would definitely consider drawing those themes in as well. If you can't get real flowers for the classroom, there are lots of great tutorials available on making paper poppies out of tissue.

Red tissue paper or dyed coffee filters (use watercolor) and black pipe cleaners work very well. I will post more detailed instructions later! The pipe cleaners can also be beaded to add more fine motor skill activity to the project.

I happen to be focused on gardening, so I plan on pairing these with life cycle of plants, trees, and spending lots of times outdoors doing observational drawing.

My book recommendation for this month:

Shelf Activity 1: Pastel Poppies

My "simple shape" for coloring, watercoloring, gluing will start out as this. I have one example colored with crayons shown here, but it could easily be done glued with red tissue paper, colored with oil pastels, paints or pencils as well.

Shelf Activity 2: Sculpture and Science Imprints

Materials:

Modeling Clay, Earth tones

Found Objects, Shells and Bones

Rolling Pin

Tray

You can also have the children experiment with rubbings of these objects, especially any shells they have. More advanced students can create still lifes. You may want to put out coloring pages for younger ones.

Shelf Activity 3: Sky Above Clouds

Materials:

Blue Construction Paper or Cardstock

White paper

Scissors

Glue

Dark Blue Ink Pad OR Oil Pastels OR Crayons

Set Up:

I didn't have safety scissors at home, so I just put those there as an example. I have one tray set up for children to prep their own clouds, or to restock the gluing tray. The second tray is set up so they can add texture to their background paper (here I used ink, but oil pastels or crayons will also work).

Finished Project:

Shelf Activity 4: Symmetry

One of the striking elements of many of O'Keeffe's abstracts is symmetry. I love folded symmetrical paintings, and this can be set up as an independent activity for older children. Here the child paints one half of the paper (on a washable placemat) and then folds the paper, and rolls over it with a rolling pin. The end result is a highly textured and symettrical painting. It might be a little messy, but it's worth the results.

Look at that texture!!

Shelf Activity 5: Coloring Abstracts

Georgia's flowers are great, but I get tired of doing them for the whole month. I made up some simple versions of her abstracts for my kids to shade.

I'll be adding a download of these soon.

There are tons of beautiful crafts out there for O'Keefe on pinterest if you are looking for more teacher led activities! Try pulling out the BIG paper too for some of these projects and letting kids get down on the floor to draw bones, flowers, landscapes and shells.