The day before my sixth-grade art lesson on Rene Magritte, our printer broke. I hadn’t yet printed out the pictures of each student, despite that I had taken pictures a month earlier. Gah. So I improvised last minute and taught the same art principles using a simplified project. Here’s how it went down. We read Mike Venezia’s Getting to Know the World’s Great Artists, used my powerpoint presentation to discuss positive and negative space, and introduced the project.
As it turns out, the original project (though I still prefer it) would have taken more time than the hour and fifteen minutes I had been allotted. So this version actually worked out perfectly. The kids still got to practice their watercolor skills, they learned about Rene Magritte, and we had a thorough discussion of positive and negative space and how it affects composition. And they got to walk out of class with a finished project. Check, check, check, check.
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- Use blue to paint larger paper, leaving white spaces for clouds
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- Make a very watered down yellow paint
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- Add yellow to white areas and blend edges of clouds
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- Draw a horizontal (but not straight) line across your black paper. Draw a bird beneath the horizontal line.
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- Cut along the horizontal line and cut out the bird.
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- Arrange both pieces on your watercolor sky and paste.
Materials used: watercolor paper, watercolors, black construction paper (or cardstock), scissors, glue, brushes
Difficulty: Easy for sixth graders. It took about an hour and some of them still had a bit of time to do this Dream Madlib, which hopefully gave them a better idea of the dreamlike subject matter embodied by the surrealists.
Rene Magritte Bird Positive Negative Space Powerpoint Presentation.