Dot, dot, dot...

We have been studying France in Geography these last two weeks and part of our cultural geography study was on the french painter Georges Seurat. I picked him from the long list of french artists because I thought painting a picture using pointillism would be different. We used the book by Mike Venezia (I love his books and so does Emma) to first read about Seurat and piontillism.

Besides pointillism, Seurat also realized that if you paint a picture where the eye is drawn upward the picture gives off a happy mood, down is sad, and across is calm. Many of his pieces have a more directional feel to relay this feeling.
Next we tried our hand at pointillism.

I helped some, but just a little, Emma would get tired of the constant dot making so I filled in here and there. We had to make sure to add in darker greens for the shadow of the tree and yellows to show the sun shining on the ground and sky.
For the last part of our lesson, Emma filled in a notebooking page. I use History Scribe for the notebook pages (love this disc, I bought it for $5 but I see it has gone up in price).

We are enjoying learning about the different artist and I will probably go through each on the Venezia books the library has. This summer we will be taking a trip to Chicago's Art museum to see some of the works from the artists studied. I can still remember the Seurat painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, when I saw it when I was a young girl. Truly breathtaking.