1,2,3 Paint with me

Happy Birthday Jasper Johns!

One of the most important American artists of this century, we celebrate you today! This morning at the OKCMOA a great group of kids ages 3-5 joined me for an exciting artistic journey through paint and collage to celebrate Jasper Johns.

To begin I shared a little bit about Johns and we looked at examples from a few books. We created our own version of his numbers series and they turned out FANTASTIC.



We began at our first workstation. I had 11x14 paper set out along with newspaper scraps, glue sticks, paintbrushes, q-tips and paint palette.



To give us texture like Jasper Johns we used newspaper scraps. Rub your glue stick on your paper and apply newspaper randomly.





Then we used our cool color palette and covered our paper.







We moved to a second workstation to paint our numbers. I precut the numbers 1, 2 and 3 and laid them out on newspaper. Here we used warm paint palette plus white and used paint brushes and q-tips.











Then we glued our numbers on top to finish our masterpiece! While our pieces were drying we gathered beneath the glow of a Chihuly chandelier to read Chicka Chicka 123 by Lois Ehlert. It is a wonderful book all about numbers. We visited the galleries and returned to the class to pick clean our workspace and collect our artwork.

Close up of the newspaper under the paint.




You will need:
-11x14 student grade watercolor paper
-newspaper scraps plus newspaper to catch mess
-scrap white paper pre-cut into numbers
-green, blue, red, yellow, orange and white tempera paint
-brushes
-q-tips

Here are a few of our finished works!