Painted Fields of Poppies

These lovely fields of poppies artworks were inspired by these two paintings:

Van Gogh:


Monet:
 

At the start of the lesson we talked about the artists and their style of painting.

As always I had to do a search for other art lessons on poppy fields and I really liked the one by Splats, Scraps and Glue Blobs so this lesson also took inspiration from their lesson.  Thank you!

I like to mix up materials as much as possible during the term so for these paintings we used Canvas Paper (I like the Monte Marte one) that I taped to pieces of MDF.  The texture of the paper also adds to the lovely final product. It's not evident from the photos below yet by taping around the paper the final product has a white frame which looks great.

I'm really happy with how these worked out and I'm going to frame my children's for sure.

What you need:

• Canvas paper taped onto wooden boards (you could use normal paper instead)
• 3 different Green acrylic paints
• 3 different Blue acrylic paints
• White, Yellow, Red and Black acrylic paint
• Paint brushes
• Oil Pastels
• Photographs of real poppies and poppy fields

How To:

We worked on these over three weeks, doing just a little each time.

Week 1: 

• Ask the children to draw a horizon line across the paper about one third down.
• Paint the grass making sure they use all three greens (grass is painted vertically)
• Paint the sky making sure they use all three blues (sky is painted horizontally)
• Paint in clouds using the white paint
• Paint in yellow flowers using the yellow paint

Week 2:

• Using oil pastels (I had three green and three different blues again) ask the children to add further lines to their works remembering that the grass runs vertically and the sky runs horizontally.
• They could also use white and yellow pastels to add more clouds or yellow flowers
• Using the red paint,  paint in the poppies (We practised drawing poppies using perspective with the big ones at the front and the little ones at the back in our visual diaries first).
• Using the black paint,  paint in the middles of the poppies

Week 3:

• Using oil pastels again add highlights to the poppies using red and orange 
• Add yellow centres to the poppies or anything else that is missing

The Results:
Stunning!

Cheers
Fiona