Animals With a Mondian Grid

Earlier this school year, I introduced the third grade students to Piet Mondrian's grid paintings. We saw some reproductions of his "Broadway Boogie Woogie" and "Victory Boogie Woogie". We made note of how he gridded his canvas and used pure hues of the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue.

The students designed an animal on scrap manilla paper. I told them to draw it so at least 3 parts of the animal touched the edge of the paper. They cut these out to use as a pattern on the white cardstock. They transfered just the outline of the animals contour shape. Inside the animal the students drew straight lines in permanent ink to form a grid. They began forming a pattern of squares and rectangles and colored each space separately. Many found out that it was easier to color a few squares while they had the marker uncapped. Then open the next color and color some more. In the end they needed to be more careful, because we tried to not color the same color in an adjacent square. Black and white were part of the design too! We framed these up on black backgrounds with cut squares and rectangles of the primary colors.

The original idea came from an article in the arts and activities magazine. I believe I saw the article posted on the website. Here is a link that will take you to the article called "Animals With a Mondrian Twist".

It was a successful lesson and the children were happy with the results. I was pleased to hang them with some beautiful flag art for the Veteran's Day program we had at school on November 11th.

If you'd like to see the entire class's work follow this link to our school's artsonia webpage.