Georgia O'Keeffe Flowers

Georgia O'Keeffe is an artist well known for her flower paintings. These paintings are up close, abstracted paintings of flowers- making you view flowers in a way you've never seen them before. This lesson is a good way to introduce to students how abstracted artwork can be representational artwork, but abstracted in a way that makes you see things in a new way. We used real flowers for our assignment and view finders. To make a view finder take a piece of paper and cut out a square in the middle that you look through and see what you will draw or paint inside. The medium my class used was watercolor, which your students should be well accustomed with now.  Have the children fill the whole so there is no empty space and draw and paint the flower. Below is my project I did, I painted a view from behind that showed where the stem met the petals.

These type of projects are a good way to teach children about artists that have come before and art methods that they created. It is important to teach them the past because then they can build upon it. Georgia O'Keeffe is an important figure to learn about much more than her paintings, she was also an important figure in striving for equality. Have fun creating with your students.

Here is a tutorial on how to do the art project at Silver Magpie Art: Georia O'Keeffe inspired watercolor tutorial: