Hundertwasser Art Project

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I was inspired by the banner on the art blog Paintedpaper (great lessons, check this blog out) for this Hundertwasser lesson. I love projects with lots of color and mixed media. I have done this three different ways in the last two weeks. The samples from this 5-6th grade class that are shown below are done on heavy cardboard, with acrylic paint, and the cut paper houses are decoupaged on. I have also done it on black poster board, with acrylic paint and just gluing the houses on, not using the mod podge. And with my preschoolers, we used chalk pastel on black poster board, and also just glued the houses on.

Hundertwasser is a fun artist to introduce to kids-they really relate to his colorful style and playful ideas. He designed houses, did paintings, created postage stamps and banners, and shared his concern for the environment thru posters. Next week  I am going to have my 7th-12th grade students do a poster in his style conveying a message that is important to them.

Supplies:

cardboard
acrylic paint in bright colors
mod podge
brushes
scrapbook paper for houses
scissors

After sharing the book  Harvesting Dreams-Hundertwasser for Kids with the students I had them draw in some simple hill shapes at the bottom of their cardboard piece. They painted the hills in green and the background in black. Then using a round brush they painted in tall flower stalks and some leaves. Using a small flat brush they topped each stem with a circle in the color of their choice. I showed them how to use the round brush to make beautiful petals for each flower, mixing and matching colors. (We added white to all the colors to make them more opaque on the black background). We then did a black spiral in the center of each flower, and white wavy lines in the background using the round brush. (Hundertwasser liked to use lines and spirals in his art).

While the paint was drying the kids picked out three different house shapes,roof shapes, and doors and windows. (I precut out a variety of different paper to save on time). When the paint was dry they decoupaged the houses on and then covered their whole painting in the mod podge to finish it off. I love how colorful and unique they all turned out.