Impressionist Landscapes

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These landscape watercolor paintings inspired by Claude Monet and the Impressionists are sure to bring calm to your classroom!  

When going outdoors to paint "en plein air" is difficult or impossible, 6th graders use photos for inspiration for these landscapes.  They focus on mixing bright, vivid colors and create their paintings one brushstroke at a time!


Step 1:  Introduction and Drawing

Show Impressionism paintings, especially those by Claude Monet. I show my students this PowerPoint about Claude Monet's work, and if time allows, I show them artwork by a few other Impressionist artists as well.  The PowerPoints I use are all available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, All About Art. We discuss what makes Impressionism unique: characteristics like the visible brushstrokes, the exaggerated bright colors, and the calm and peaceful atmosphere.  Tell students we will be making our own Impressionist Landscape paintings!


Now, the Impressionists are known for making their paintings “en plein air”.  However, I teach in an urban area in New England, where 1.) it’s winter for practically half the school year, and 2.) outside our school isn’t exactly picturesque landscape scenery.  So, we have to improvise and work from photographs and our imagination. Students can bring in their own photo of a landscape that inspires them, or they can browse the landscape reference photos I provide.  I instruct students to use the photo for inspiration, as a starting point, but not to copy it exactly.

It is very helpful to have students browse these inspirational photos before beginning this project, so you don’t have a big crowd of kids trying to flip through a pile of images together.  I have students choose their image as soon as they’ve finished our last project because they all tend to finish at different times. Then, once they’ve chosen their image, they can work on whatever other assignment or task I have lined up for early finishers.

Once all students have their idea, we can begin sketching out our landscape compositions.


Step 2: Painting

After one class period of creating our drawings, many students are ready to start painting with watercolors.  We review the Impressionist characteristics we learned last class, especially making sure you can see every individual brushstroke, and focusing on using bright colors.  Students paint their landscapes using small strokes of paint that do not touch each other (lest the wet strokes blend in with each other). I put a big emphasis on mixing custom colors - how boring it would be if every painting used the same 8 colors in the watercolor set!


Students spend the next 2 or 3 class periods filling in their paintings with small strokes of paint.  I encourage them to mix as many different colors as they can for each area to give their paintings more life and vibrancy.  The process is meditative and the results are beautiful, the students are so proud of their work!!


Happy Painting!!

A Claude Monet PowerPoint to accompany this lesson can be found in my TpT store, All About Art.  Or get the Claude Monet PowerPoint together with three other great Impressionist artists for a discount in the Impressionist Artist PowerPoint Bundle!

 

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