Paul Klee Inspired Castles

    I've seen lots of castle-type artworks based on the works of Paul Klee in the art education blog-o-sphere lately and have loved them all!  I used these multiple inspirations to create this lesson for 5th grade at Brimfield earlier this year.  We started by looking at many of Klee's paintings and looked for common themes.  The students found many abstract elements in his works, many architectural elements, and many repeating squares, rectangles, and triangles.  We ended our "gallery walk" of Klee's works with Castle and Sun, and used it as the main inspiration for the artworks the students would create. 

     The students' assignment was to draw a castle, with as many or as little abstract elements as they wanted, and to mostly rely on squares, rectangles, and triangles to do the job!  Many different-looking castles resulted and I was happy to see this!  We then embarked on the use of many different media steps to complete these artworks.

    We traced the lines with regular washable markers.  Then, the students traced the marker lines with glue.  I have had kids trace many different kinds of artworks in glue, but never on top of washable markers.  The result looked like we had used many different kinds of colored glue, and the kids really liked it.  I can't believe I had never tried this before!  When the glue was dry, they colored with watercolor crayons and watercolor pencils.  Then, they painted water over the dry media and THEN painted more regular watercolor paint over any areas that needed a little more "umph"!  Some of the students really ended up with some sophisticated-looking areas of color from the various watercolor media used!