Dots! Pointillism Technique Painting

My artistic homeschooling mama friend did a great art lesson with my daycare group last week.  She started out by showing the children a book about George Seurat.  They looked at some of his more well known paintings and talked about how he painted his pictures. Pointillism is a technique of painting using small dots of pure colour to create an image.

She had the children help her with a little colour mixing demonstration.  The group figured out that mixing two primary colours made a third colour. Volunteers got to tape coloured circles onto a big piece of paper on the wall to make a reference colour chart.

Then, she used Q-tips and showed the kids how to dab a bit of paint of one colour beside dots of paint of a second colour.  When one child held the paper up a little distance away from the group, the colours seemed to blend together in front of our eyes and create a third colour. The children found this discovery amazing!

Since there was a variety of ages for this art lesson, the children worked through three different stations.  One station included dot-to-dot pictures.

This station was geared for the younger children.  The little ones could create their own pictures using sticker dots.

The painting station included lots of Q-tips, examples of George Seurat’s work and paint. The children had access to red, yellow and blue paint.  They could use the reference colour chart to help them remember what primary colours blend together to make secondary colours.  Some children were keen to experiment with the dot technique while others preferred to use the Q-tips as mini brushes.

Some of the older children used pencils and rulers to duplicate Georges Seurat’s famous painting, The Seine and la Grande Jatte Springtime 1888. After they had outlined the major objects in the painting they filled in the picture with colour using the Q-tips.

Happy dot painting to all the little artists out there in home daycare land!