Degas Art Lesson

The kids and I are continuing to use Meet the Masters for our art lesson.  As usual we read the book "The Greatest Artist -- Degas" by Mike Venzia to get some back ground information as well as watch the mini unit on the Meet Masters web site.

Degas is most famous for his portraits of ballet but is also loved going to the race track and painting pictures of horses.

The program gave us two choices for the art work to complete---either a ballerina

or a horse and jockey--both kids chose this picture to recreate

First we had to block out our paper with even squares to help recreate the drawing

It was recommended to complete the picture upside down as this helps with the brain to only observe the lines and not see the picture as a whole.

This is mine attempt at copying the ballerina, I was pretty pleased with it considering it is all done free hand just using the squares as my guide

At first the kids were very scared of this process and worried it wouldn't look right but with encouragement they gave it a try 

Once they completed the drawing we used chalk to color it in

after coloring the picture we went back and traced over the pencil lines with heavy black pencil. 

This is princess's version again I think she captured the original one great.

Little Mans piece turned out great and this is the  first advance drawing I have ever seen him do.  I only helped a teeny bit for the body.  

Here is my version of the picture

I also did the Ballerina although the children chose to pass on doing this one today.

This was the hardest assignment from this series so far but I have to say I was very impressed on how well the children did.  We are hoping to visit a museum very soon to see some of Degas' original works of arts in Paris.