On our first day of the “Modern Masters” workshop, we learned about Diego Rivera.  We started out by reading Mike Venezia’s book about Rivera.  I love his series, “Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Artists!”  He throws in enough humor with just the right amount of factual information to keep the kids listening. : )  We talked about murals and why they are important and found Mexico on the map.  We then did a project based on Rivera’s painting, “El Vendedor de Alcatraces.”  The drawings were done on yellow paper, colored with chalk pastels, cut out, and glued on black paper.  The flowers were cut, colored and pasted on the final piece.

This was challenging to draw, but we only had to draw half of the image.  Their yellow papers were folded in half vertically, so we drew half of the image on the right side and rubbed the folded paper to transfer the lines to the left side.  This gave us the opportunity to discuss  symmetry.  These are so bright and were a lot of fun to make.

Thanks to Patty at Deepspacesparkle for the original lesson plan. : )