Our School's Georgia O'Keeffe Art Lesson

Art lessons from the classroom: With spring blooming at our backdoor, we tossed most of our textbooks aside for a while and decided it was time for some spring art. We've had fun learning about Georgia O'Keeffe and her artwork. I thought I'd share an art technique with you that will help your budding artists.

Our lesson started with a whirlwind tour of The Georgia O'Keefe museum HERE. I've said it before, but I don't know if I'd make it as a homeschool teacher without the internet. We were able to tour this museum from our home. Now that's great!! I sorted the artwork by category first, so we were just looking at the flowers. You'll need to do the same because not all of her work is for the kiddos. 

We talked about the colors and her techniques. My student was interested and ready to go. 

Next, I armed him with his camera and sent him outside with simple directions. Take pictures of the flowers in our yard the same way a bird or bee  would see them. The images to the right of the post are my 2nd graders O'Keeffe inspired collection of what's blooming in our neck of the woods.

This is the picture that I liked the best. While it's not a flower, my kiddo still followed my directions. This is from a bird's eye view. Can you guess what it is?

With our photos ready, it was time to work on some art of our own. This is a simple technique that can have great results in your classroom.

1. Ask your kiddos to place one dot on their paper. No matter where they put this dot, it becomes the middle of the flower.

2. Now, for the next set of directions. Choose either Wide or Narrow. This choice will determine the width of the petals. My kiddo chose narrow and I chose wide.

3. Next, draw the narrow or wide petals out from the middle of the flower with pencil. The only rule is that the petals must go off the edge of the paper on all four sides. This is what gives us the bird's eye view.

4. Then we traced our pencil lines with colorful permanent markers.

5. We finished up our flowers with your standard water colors. I really loved the results.

My Kiddo's Flower

My Flower

I hope you're able to use this technique in your classroom no matter where your classroom may be.

Enjoy!

Robin @ Little Blogfish