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Our new Spielgaben upgrade kit recently arrived in the mail and the girls have been very busy creating with the new pieces.

There has been lots of creativity with the new play board and dots. Making patterns and pictures and telling stories.

I like this one with the overlapping diamonds by Miss 6.

While watching them recently I commented that what they were making reminded me of a type of art called ‘Pointillism’.

We got down one of our art books so I could explain what it meant and I read them the page about Georges Seurat’s painting ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte‘. We learned about how it had taken two years to plan and paint the artwork and that it was made up of millions of tiny dots and dashes of colour. To create the sparkle of the water and the glow of the grass he used dots of contrasting colours that when viewed from a distance blur together creating brighter colours. The girls were amazed and spent a long time looking at all the details they could see in the painting. Next I invited them to try their own dotty paintings.

We used washable poster paint, canvases, and small wooden dowel to make the dots. Miss 4 got straight to work putting lots of different coloured dots all over the canvas.

Miss 6 decided to sketch her picture first, as Seurat had done.

As predicted, the paint eventually made it onto little fingers.

I love to see them so immersed in what they’re doing!

Aren’t the results beautiful?

This morning they were back to making more ‘spotty’ designs with Spielgaben so I’m sure we’ll be repeating this activity again and doing some more learning about Pointillism in the near future.

Have you explored any new art techniques lately?

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