Project #3 Finger Painting

This is my finger painting, and I have entitled it ‘Home’. Before we painted, we learned about Vincent Van Gogh and his styles of painting. We learned about the lines he used to show movement and emotion. One painting of Van Gogh’s that we observed was ‘Starry Night’. It was neat to see how the lines and colors blended together to create feeling. We were then given the opportunity to either paint a replicate of the ‘Starry Night’ or create our own picture. I decided to create my own picture, to use the combination of colors and lines to show my feelings of something that is very important to me in my life, which is ‘Home’. The rules of this painting were to use foreground, middle ground, and background. In my picture, it shows my farm.  The foreground is of my house, the middle of our barn, and the background of cows grazing and a corn field. I love being home and everything about it; the animals, my family, the space, the beauty, and the great sense of knowing when life knocks you down, you always have somewhere to go to just “get away from everything bad”. In this finger painting, I tried to use lines like those of Van Gogh’s to show texture of the grass, roofs of buildings, and the road. I used many colors and mixed them to create darker colors or lighter colors.

For an extension activity, I would also have my students learn about Vincent Van Gogh and his painting styles of lines and movement. We would discuss how to mix colors and how to create lines using your whole finger, or just the tip of your finger. The activity I would have them do to illustrate what they learned, would be to finger paint their favorite season. They can use the many colors of the season they like the best and combine it with lines to show movement. For example, if one student’s favorite season is spring, they can show movement with the spring showers on colorful flowers and show blending colors as well. If another student’s favorite season is fall, they can paint leaves blowing around the picture using lines to show movement. I think my students would be able to express themselves with their favorite season and the wonderful colors that go along with it, as well as using lines to express movement in their pictures.