Art Inspired by Picasso's Three Musicians

In art this term, we have been focusing on collage.  One of my favourite art projects creating a picture in response to Picasso's, "Three Musicians."

First we looked at the art piece and talked about what we noticed.  This fit nicely into our math unit on shape and space.  It is interesting to talk about what different people see in the same picture.

Next we responded to the piece, responding to questions: What does this picture remind you of?  What do you think is happening here?  We also talked about our feelings and this picture and what it was about the piece that affected our feelings.

Before we got to work, we set some criteria:

• the entire page needed to be covered
• there had to be at least one person 
• there had to be at least one musical instrument

We started with 11x17 white paper.  They were given a piece of black paper that was letter sized to add a layer to the background.  I used pieces of scrap book paper and song sheets from old music books torn into pieces and placed in baskets at each table group.  The rest was up to them.  I love how each person met the criteria, but in so many different ways.

To tie into a recent writing lesson about giving titles to our work, each person was asked to think of a name for the piece they had created.