Paul Cezanne Inspired Still-Lifes

January's Artist of the Month was Paul Cezanne so my Second Grade Class looked at a bunch of his artwork.  I explained that he was famous for his still-lifes.  

The first thing we started with was the background.  We made our line separating the Wall from the table.  The Wall was made doing a crayon resist.  The students used Crayons to draw a design on their Wall and then painted on top using watercolors.  If you have never done this before what happens is, the wax from the crayon repels the watercolors, causing the crayon to show through and the watercolor paint to fill in the empty spaces creating a nice effect.  

The table was created using actual fabric.  

 The next step was creating the basket.  If you haven't realized this yet from reading my blog, I love incorporating as many different materials and skills as possible in one project.  So instead of just drawing a basket, I wanted the students to weave paper.  We went over the under over technique.  Students wove an entire piece of rectangle paper, drew the basket, then cut out the basket.  After the basket is cut out, all of the edges of the strips must be glued down so that the strips don't come out of place.

For the Fruit, I had the students draw the fruit from observation using oil pastels.  I brought in all kinda of fruit and laid them out on each table.  The students were encouraged to mix colors to make the fruits look as realistic as possible.  The students were a little hesitant with this at first but started to get the idea by the end. 

 The next step was arranging the fruit in the basket.  The students and I talked about balance.  THey want to try and balance their fruit with both color and shape.  The fruits should just not be randomly glued on.  Artists, like Paul Cezanne, take a lot of time to plan and arrange their compositions to get the best possible positions.

The last thing we added were shadows.  I put all of the fruit into a basket to show students how shadows really exist.  When shadows are added in their pictures, it gives the entire picture a more realistic effect.  

I think Paul Cezanne would have been very proud of these second graders!