Georgia O'Keeffe Watercolour Flowers

Our theme this week was FLOWERS...
The studio was filled with them. So inspiring and lovely to look at!!!

I'm currently doing a fabulous Ecourse "Teaching Art 101" by Deep Space Sparkle.  It's been so much fun learning new lessons and tricks, practicing them and connecting with other like minded individuals from all over the globe.   I now have a wealth of exciting lesson ideas for next term.  One lesson used watercolours to paint Georgia O'Keeffe inspired flowers.  Georgia O'Keeffe was our artist of the week a few weeks back and the children really seemed to like her style (and that she was a woman artist for once!!).  It's a fairly easy lesson on watercolours and the results are amazing.  It's a great multi-age lesson.  I have children aged 5 to 12 and they all enjoyed it and produced wonderful artworks.

Materials
Watercolour Paper
Watercolour Paints (I used liquid watercolours as that's all I had. The lesson plan suggested pan watercolours)
Flowers for inspiration (I placed real flowers around the studio, books with flowers in them and showed the children several Georgie O'Keeffe paintings)
Salt (we added to the centre of the flowers for the speckled appearance)
Black oil pastel or black permanent marker

I started with a demonstration on how to draw a large flower with petals that went all the way off the page (so it looks close up in typical Georgia O'Keeffe style).  The children did the outline in black oil pastel (younger children) or permanent marker (older children).  The background was painted first, followed by the flower and finally the centre.  I suggested contrasting colours so each component stood out.  The children did a great job and some even wanted to do another one!

The finished pieces are really lovely.   I've placed my children's paintings on the hallway wall already!  I think some IKEA frames would complete them wonderfully.

Our artist of the week is Gustav Klimt.  I showed the children some of his paintings.  They didn't seem too taken by his work although they do like the idea of painting with gold paint!

Klimt "The Kiss"

Cheers Fiona