Art: Claude Monet, Mixing Colours and the Great Fire of London

In our Art lessons, we have been learning about Claude Monet and impressionism. In our artist study, we learned that he was a French painter who founded impressionist painting. He focused mainly on painting nature and the outdoors. We also learned that Monet often painted the same scene many times to capture the changing light of the passing seasons.

To understand his artwork more, we looked at The Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903), Banks of the Seine (1880) and The Seine at Giverny (1897).

We spoke about what we could see within his work. We saw lots of different colours and the three pieces of art that we looked at all included water and a reflection. We also noticed that he used lots of small brush strokes to create his work and that the details were not too precise. In our sketchbooks, we wrote about what we noticed about Monet’s work and what we liked about it.

From here, we had a go at mixing together some primary colours to create orange as we would need this colour in the coming days (you’ll find out about that soon!). To create orange, we first discussed the three primary colours that we have: red, blue and yellow. We learned that to make orange, we had to mix together red and yellow. With our watercolours, we had a go at creating this colour in our palette. Once we had our orange, we then tried to make tones by adding white. We learned that this helps to make our colours lighter. Finally, we added black to our original orange to ‘tint‘ it and make it darker. We know that when mixing colours, using white and black can be very useful!

Today though, we had a closer look at Monet’s Houses of Parliament Sunset artwork, as it links nicely with our learning in history and geography about London, particularly the Great Fire of London. We then compared this to a piece of art that shows us what the Great Fire of London might have looked like. We then discussed the colours that we would need to use to for fire, smoke, the River Thames and reflections too! We knew that we wanted to try to use small brush strokes, like Monet, to create our pieces of art. This was different from what lots of us are used to, as we then tried to blend these together on our page too. Once our background was dry, we then went back in with some charcoal to define our dark buildings and some of the smoke too. We had a great time with this art, even if it was slightly challenging at times too!

What did you enjoy about your art lessons this week?