Create Your Own Picasso Painted Collage

Pablo Picasso’s art spanned many styles as he grew as an artist. I have posted about Picasso before and recommended that you try your hand at a music collage in his style. At the beginning of the summer I went to an art exhibit that had one of Picasso’s painted collages. Today’s project was inspired by that painting.

Note: My aunt created the jazzy painting with the brown background, and I painted the picture of the dog walker with the blue background. We used a lot of small pieces because we wanted to have fun with the project, but you can use as few or as many shapes of any size. It would be interesting to create a collage painting using only circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. You would really start to notice the way objects are just made up of shapes stuck together.

You will need two sessions to complete this project.

Supplies Needed:

Poster board shape tracers
Pencil
Foam board or heavy paper in the color of your background
Craft paint
Paintbrush
Water

The fun thing about this project is that two people will use the same shapes to create completely different paintings. My aunt and I both wanted to use all the shapes available so we could show this to you. You can pick which shapes you want to include in your painting and which you want to leave out.
Choose a sheet of paper or a piece of foam board in the color you’d like your background to be. You could also paint a solid color over the entire paper. Trust me; it’s a pain to paint the background after you’ve traced your image onto your paper. If you decide to paint your background, remember to let it dry before you go on.

Arrange the tracers into a picture on your paper. Move them around until you create an image you like. This seems like it would be difficult, but the shapes will form into pictures if you move them around enough. Remember, the color of the tracers doesn’t matter because you’re going to paint later.
When you’re happy with the layout, trace each shape with your pencil. This is the trickiest part of this project because the shapes can move if you aren’t careful. Take your time.
This is a good place to take a break if you need one.

The final step is to paint. At this point, you’re basically filling in a coloring book page. It’s much more satisfying, though, because you drew the outline yourself.

Allow your painting to dry and then compare it to the paintings your friends made using the same group of shape tracers. What similarities and differences do you notice?

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Picasso and the Girl with the Ponytail by Laurence Anholt

Welcome to another Fantastic Fiction Friday! (Yes, I finally thought of a decent name for it.) Two things before we get to the book:

Happy Birthday, Mom!! Check out these artist palette birthday cakes!

AND

One more cool link (in case yesterday’s link madness wasn’t enough). This one is really fun. At Mr. Picasso Head, you can create your own Picasso-inspired portrait.
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I have recommended Laurence Anholt to you before. Remember The Magical Garden of Claude Monet? Today, I’d like to tell you about another book in the same series: Picasso and the Girl with the Ponytail. This book is also based on a true story.

Sylvette is a shy girl whose neighbor happens to be Pablo Picasso. When Picasso sees Sylvette he decides that he must paint her. He loves her face and her ponytail and thinks Sylvette would be a beautiful subject. She agrees to pose and Picasso creates many paintings and sculptures of his lovely neighbor. When the artwork becomes famous, Sylvette must really put aside her shyness. Eventually, Sylvette is able to achieve her own dream.

But you’ll have to read the book for yourself to find out what that dream is.

I love Anholt’s illustrations in this book. He did a great job of showing the way Picasso’s artwork changed over time.

This picture book has a lot of text and takes about 15 or 20 minutes to read aloud.

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Cubism

In the early 1900s, some artists became interested in African and Native American art. The styles of those cultures inspired cubism.

Cubism began in France in 1907. Pablo Picasso and George Braque began painting figures that were made up of cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, and other geometric shapes. The paintings looked like someone had cut them up and glued them back together.

And that’s exactly what the cubists had in mind. Just like the ancient Egyptians, cubists wanted to show the most important parts of the things they painted. Look at the face in Juan Gris' Portrait of Picasso (above). Gris shows you every detail of Picasso's face even though you would never be able to see all sides of his face at the same time. The cubists took this idea much further than the ancient Egyptians, of course. Cubists wanted to show all the sides of an object in the same picture.

Some cubist paintings were extremely abstract. In Picasso’s The Guitar Player (above), it is difficult to see the person in the painting.

At first, cubists used very little color in their paintings. They used mostly browns, greys, and blues. In 1912, color re-entered the picture and some artists, like Picasso, began using more then just paint and canvas in their art. You may remember reading about Picasso’s musical collages in which he used paper and cloth in his paintings.

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Andre Derain

Andre Derain was such a star during most of his life but I would guess that many of you hadn’t heard of him before yesterday’s post on fauvism. After today, all that will be changed!

Andre Derain was born in 1880 just outside of Paris to a pastry chef. He was a terrible student but he was great at drawing and, when he was fifteen, began painting lessons. It was because of these lessons that Derain met Henri Matisse who would also become a fauvist.

In 1900, Derain and his new friend, Maurice de Vlaminck, rented an old restaurant to use as a studio. During this time Derain studied the works of the masters that hung in the Louvre and he visited new exhibits to keep up to date on the happenings in the art world. He was called into military service at the end of 1900 but before he left he introduced Vlaminck and Matisse, thus paving the way for fauvism.

When he returned from the service in 1904, Derain’s career began to pick up. A wealthy art collector bought all the paintings in his studio in 1905, then Derain showed at the Salon des Independants where he sold four paintings. Later that year he showed at the Salon d’Automne where the fauvist movement got its name. (Shown below is Collioure.)

In 1906, the art collector who had bought out Derain’s studio wanted more paintings. Derain went to London to create these paintings which became some his most popular and most famous. Below is London Bridge, one of thirty paintings Dearain completed in London.
Late in 1906, Derain met Picasso. This friendship would last for many years and Picasso would influence Derain to experiment with cubism (like in the painting shown below, Cubist Grove, which is cubist more in color than in overall style) as the fauvists began to move on to other styles.
Derain illustrated two books around this time, one by Guillaume Apollinaire and a book of poetry by Max Jacob.

Around 1911, Derain’s work began to show the influence of the old masters he had studied at the Louvre. In 1914 he was again called into military service. When he finished his duty in 1919 he continued to develop in this more classical style. Below is Portrait of a Young Girl in Black, an early example of Derain's later style.
Derain became even more popular and he was thought highly of throughout the art world and beyond. In the year leading up to World War II, however, Derain’s downfall began. Hitler’s foreign minister wanted Derain to paint a family portrait. Derain did not paint the portrait but he did go to Germany on an official visit. This was not a popular thing to have done and after the war Derain could never regain his position in the art world. Several negative books were published about him during his lifetime which made him unsure about his work. He couldn’t create the way he used to.

He lived his final year with an eye infection and was then killed by a car in 1954.

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Current NaNoEdMo Hour Count: 13.5/50hours
Yeah. I'm not doing so well with this but those 13.5 hours have made a huge difference.

Degenerate Art

In 1927, the Nazis created a society that would control art. They said they were trying to prevent it from becoming dirty or corrupted. The Nazis wanted to create a society in which everyone looked alike and had like ideas and opinions. What better way to control thinking than to control art?

Imagine if the government decided to destroy any record of any music that wasn’t classical. And then they did it. Suddenly you couldn’t listen to anything with lyrics. There would be no more rock or hip hop or country or anything else. These music styles have helped to shape our culture and our ideas and after awhile I believe that our thinking would begin to change in their absence. This is what the Nazis were trying to do.

Anyway, they took more than 20,000 works of art, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture, by about 200 artists and chose 650 or so for their exhibit of “Degenerate Art.” The exhibit traveled around Germany, making 12 stops in large cities, before many of the works of art were destroyed.

The exhibit was set up to poke fun at the displayed works of art. The walls were often covered with graffiti, and the artists’ names and titles of paintings were sloppily handwritten on note cards next to the works. Click here to watch a short video clip of people looking at paintings in the Degenerate Art exhibit.

Several artists about whom you have already read, were included in the Degenerate Art exhibit, including Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian.

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Create Your Own Picasso-Inspired Collage

The great thing about creating art is that you never have to show it to anyone if you don’t like the way it turns out. Thus, I am not posting a photo of my collage. I hope you have better luck with your Picasso-inspired musical collages.

Supplies Needed:

Poster board
Colored papers
Sheet music
Newspaper
Paints
White glue
Water
Paintbrush

Cut shapes from your colored papers. You could cut pieces of musical instruments in any colors you’d like or cut music notes. Cut out pieces from your sheet music (do a search for sheet music and print something out if you don’t have any music you can cut up) and use words from newspaper headlines if you want your collage to say something.

Choose what kind of paper you want to use for your background. Picasso often used wallpaper but wrapping paper will work well also. If you don’t have either, tear up pieces of construction paper to make your own background.

Mix a little glue with water to thin it. This will make your paper turn out less wrinkled after you glue it down.

Brush on enough glue to hold the background. Stick it to the poster board. Arrange your collage pieces on top of the background and, when you like the way the collage looks, glue down all the pieces.

You can add paint to your collage, too. Maybe you want to accentuate some of the notes in your sheet music with red paint. Or you could add guitar strings. Use your imagination.

Good luck!

Click here for a Matisse-inspired collage project.

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Picasso's musical collages

Thank you to all who commented on my noveling adventure. Your support really means a lot. Now that's recovered a bit I can post properly again.

Picasso was born in 1881 in Spain. Picasso’s father was a painter and sculptor and began Picasso’s art education at an early age. Picasso lived in Paris for much of his life where he lived passionately until his death in 1973. His art grew and changed throughout his life and he was key in forming several important artistic movements. I could and will write posts on each of Picasso’s “periods,” as they are called.

Music influenced many of Picasso’s pieces, including his collages. Today’s post will be on these musical collages.

Picasso used wallpaper, cloth, and sheet music in his musical collages as well as paint. He used wallpaper most often to create the background and then cut the sheet music, cloth, paper scraps, and newspaper into the shape of guitars or pieces of guitars. Then he combined the shapes on the collage to represent a guitar.

Look at the collages shown below and think about what you might want to use in your own collage. Tomorrow I’ll post a Picasso inspired collage project.

Glass of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar, and Newspaper:

Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass:

Guitar and Sheet Music:

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Collages

You have probably made a collage before by cutting out magazine pictures and gluing them to another sheet of paper to create a new picture or pattern. Many artists have also used this technique in their paintings. These artists include Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, who I’ll post articles and projects on during the next two weeks.

Picasso was the first to use collage in painting. In 1912 he glued a piece of cloth with a chair caning pattern, the woven part of the seat, to his painting Still Life with Chair Caning (shown below). This allowed him to use 3D to portray the things he saw.

For Matisse, collages were a way he could continue to create art when he fell sick late in his life. He hand-painted pieces of white paper with bold, solid colors and arranged them into pictures. The collages, such as Iccarus shown below, were then used in his book, Jazz.

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Current NaNoWriMo Word Count:

40552 / 50000 words. 81% done!
It’s the final countdown! Just 5 more days.