Gustav Klimt

You don't know who Gustav Klimt is?  Well, neither did I until about last week.  You can read about him here but if you want to skip that, all you need to know is that he was an artist.  Gustav was featured this week by the Meet the Masters Art Program at our elementary school.

You don't know what Meet the Masters is?  I only know because I have a school aged kid.  Different school districts call it different things, but BG has been doing this ever since she entered Kindergarten.  The entire school learns about a famous, normally deceased, artist and then makes their own piece of art that kinda replicates the technique that artist is famous for. 

I say kinda replicates the techniques because it's more of a the end results look like their work, we don't always get there the same way.  For instances, if we were learning about Van Gogh, the hour allowed for in class instruction is not enough to do layered painting.  But if the kids put some yellow swirls onto blue paint, it will look like The Starry Night.

From what I learned about Gustav Klimt is that he liked to emboss, use gold and silver, and precious and semi-precious stones.  His subjects were the female body, Asian inspired, and he loved geometric and curved lines. Oh, and he was from Vienna.  That's all I know.

Our vocabulary words are emboss, pattern, shape and texture.

Did I mention that I got to teach the kids how to make their projects?  It's what I signed up for before BG signed me up for asst. room mom, also. 

My experience with this started right after our 1.5 hour training last week that ended with a shortage of supplies due to a misunderstanding and the paper had been cut to the wrong size.  I came to the rescue and cut 800plus 9x9 squares for the entire student body.  It only took me two nights after the kids went down to bed.  I've started drinking coffee this week, also.

Happily everything was ready for Monday morning when I got to have my first in-class teaching experience. We embossed a Kimono onto foil paper and added sparkly stickers as our diamonds.  So cool. 

Here are my Kimonos.  The purple kimono is my training piece.  I thought that my next one it would be so much nicer because I would already know what I was doing.  I forgot to factor in that I would be teaching 20 kids at the same time.  The orange kimono is the same if not worst.  Mind I did it in about 2 minutes and there are no sparkly gems.  Sad orange Kimono.

I was really impressed with the artwork that came out of this project.  Some of the kids were upset if they goofed up a little while others didn't follow directions at all.  I just wish I could show you all the different interpretations of the same thing.  I forgot to take pictures.

My other training pieces were the Tree of Life (3rd & 4th grade) and the Eyeball thing (5th grade).  I lost my Tree of Life which is a shame because it was my best piece.  I had both convex and concave embossing on it.  I hope I find it.  The Eyeball thing I didn't follow the directions. 

I figure that I'm not teaching 5th graders and well, you can't tell a creative person that they have to create a piece of art to follow specific directions.  Both sides are suppose to be the same shape, with the foil showing through the middle of two black sheets of paper.  I did the big eye that you see and then 9 little eyes on the back.  I would show it to you, but it's really ugly. 

Next month is Norman Rockwell :)