Gerhard Richter is a contemporary German artist who is well-known for his photorealistic paintings that he then blurs using a soft brush or squeegee. He is also famous for creating abstract paintings and then using a squeegee to scrape away paint.

For this project, we painted two sheets of paper the primary colors. When painting, we had to work thickly and quickly with our paint so that it wouldn't dry. After students had covered their papers with the primary colors, they used a strip of tagboard to scrape away the paint on their paper. As they scraped, the primary colors would mix together and create the secondary colors. The kids thought this was the COOLEST THING EVERRRRR and I thought it was pretty cool too for re-learning our color mixing! As they scraped, they could also change the pressure to their scraping and it would create different effects on their paper.

I saw this project floating around somewhere on Pinterest and thought it would be a great chance to touch on shapes again with me first graders!

Reggie Laurent is a contemporary artist who makes abstract paintings. His artwork features brightly colored shapes on a black background. The shapes vary from geometric to organic. On top of the shapes, he paints vibrant lines and patterns.

Throughout the project, we talked a lot about the difference between organic and geometric shapes. I usually say that geometric shapes are shapes that have a name or that they are shapes with a lot of straight edges. Organic shapes are shapes that are blobs. We cut out tons of organic and geometric shapes and glued them to a black background. When gluing, we glued so that our shapes didn't touch each other. Our scissors were SUPER hungry so we did TONS of cutting. We recapped on using our glue properly too.

The 2nd class, we finished up cutting and gluing. After that, we used a white crayon to create squiggly lines between our shapes. Lastly, we used construction paper crayons to add lines and patterns to our shapes.