Alexander Calder Paintings

Alexander Calder was an American artist who is most well-known for his large metal mobiles that hang from ceilings. We took a look at his paintings instead and I was pleased to hear that the first thing my artists noticed was his use of the primary colors!

We kicked off the project by drawing triangles on our paper. I emphasized that their triangles needed to start at the bottom of their paper and gradually work their way up. After drawing each triangle, students drew another line diagonally downwards from the triangle's peak which created a pyramid-like effect. Students quickly noticed that by working from the bottom up, it created the illusion of space from all of the overlapping. After they finished drawing, they traced everything with a black crayon.

On the second day of class, we cut out our triangles/mountains. Then we painted using the primary colors. With our paintings, we only ended up painting one side of each triangle. This created an effect like light was hitting one side of the triangle. Lastly, we glued our paintings down to a secondary colored background. It got a little messy because students were gluing down wet paintings but I didn't want to spend another class period just to cut them out and glue them to their backgrounds.