O'Keefe Inspirations

Acrylics and tissue paper

My "fearless" creator Talia (7) was not happy with her painting and she regretted not painting it more simply . It is Gorgeous and I couldn't disagree more. But this brought up a conversation about the importance of taking risks as an artist and not always playing it safe. These children are only in the 2nd grade, but I wanted her to treasure her loose and free spirit. And of course I told them no artist likes every piece they've created, even the "greats." It's important to have fun with the process.

I love the bits of white showing throughout this piece.

Tissue paper and acrylics

This 8 yr old has the style of a graphic artist -

Precise, confident lines and a love for painting with minimal

color palettes

Beautiful work Paige! Acrylics

We had one more day left for my Tuesday afternoon art class and I had a unanimous request to do a Georgia O'Keefe flower project. I'm always game for that! But I wanted to try a new approach. I found these lovelies on Artopotamus. They were created with tissue paper, watercolor and chalk pastels. But with just one class, I had to make some adjustments. We started out with large board and tried creating asymmetrical flower compositions with pencil and then Sharpie. For those who wanted to use tissue paper, we just ripped pieces and decoupaged them to our boards with watered down glue. While still wet the children added acrylic paint in analogous colors and white to their compositions. We looked at photographs of flowers to see the variety of shades and colors in one flower, rather than just using one flat color. The pieces were dry enough by the end of class to go over our Sharpie lines again or switch to black oil pastel for extra boldness.