Meeting the Master: Mondrian

Well, this wasn’t technically PART of the Meet the Masters curriculum for Mondrian.  But I wanted to do something fun and SIMPLE that would reinforce the idea of the primary colours that he loved so much.  I found this project which is very easy (okay, totally brainless; just my speed!) colour-mixing art activity and decided to give it a try.

First, we sang the ridiculous “three blind mice” colours song that comes with the MTM program.  It’s very ridiculous… I won’t even excerpt it here, because there are probably copyright restrictions.  Needless to say, it’s a silly song about the three primary colours.  Substitute any bit of nonsense you want; it was nice starting with a song, anyway.

Then, on with the fun!  Luckily, Abba was home to help.  I gave everyone (including me) three dollops of paint:  red, yellow, blue, on a piece of fairly sturdy paper:

 

Then, I covered the paper with what I call Saran Wrap, but the world seems to call “plastic wrap” (no, ours is NOT Saran brand plastic wrap… but I call it that anyway, as my mother and probably grandmother did before me):

Here, the paint blobs are underneath the plastic.

Then, we all got to work, SQUOOSHING the paints together!!!

   

This step gets a bit messy.  Be prepared to keep pulling the plastic wrap back into place.  It’s not a great activity for teeny weeny kids, because it takes a bit of co-ordination to squoosh and keep the plastic covering up the paint.  It was a good activity for Gavriel Zev, however, because he tends to focus on one area and wreck the paper whenever he has painted anything in past.  This way, he couldn’t exactly wreck the paper, and he got the same results everyone else did:

Finally, (gently) peel off the plastic!!!  I used Naomi Rivka’s plastic, while it was still wet with paint, to create a secondary “print” that she was actually quite proud of.

  

I finished up by pointing out to the kids all the great colours they have created that were not there when they started!  Where did they come from?  How did they make ORANGE?  Purple?  What happens at the centre of the painting where all the colours smooshed together?  (kind of a mud-colour…)

I left these to dry outside, and the paper got quite wrinkly, but I think the effects were gorgeous for a NO-BRAINER, ZERO-EFFORT art project.  Considering I was wondering how in the world I was going to teach them art…