Primary Colours and Piet Mondrian

I have 2 Mondrain activities to share with you.  I love to use the works of Piet Mondrian to introduce primary colours to my students.

 I did the following Mondrian inspired art with my class last year.  Students used pencils and rulers to draw 5 vertical lines and 4 horizontal lines.  I then asked them to erase a few of the smaller lines created when lines crossed each other.  Using a black pastel the students traced over their lines.  We then used red, blue and yellow tempera block paints to colour in a few of the shapes... They probably coloured in too many but kids love colour and it was hard to keep them from painting in the whole page!

                                                 

This second version I tried this year.  We integrated computers with art. 

Kids used the program KidPix to create their grid lines.  They had to use the pencil tool to draw straight vertical and horizontal lines from one edge to the other.  Then using the eraser they had to erase a few of the small lines.  Any erasing that took away too much black was later corrected with a black marker.

We then used broad tip markers to colour in the rectangular shapes.  It was a great opportunity to teach them proper colouring techniques using markers. 

I love how bold the lines turned out using the computer program.  Ideally we would have used the paint bucket feature to fill in the colour but our school's computer lab printer only prints in black and white.