Klimt Trees

Fourth graders read the book "Klimt and his Cat" and looked at the artwork of Gustav Klimt. They discovered that he makes his trees with interesting spiral branches.



First we talked about what a landscape is and then we painted our own landscapes using the cool color family (blue, green and purple) for the land and the warm color family (red, yellow, and orange) for the sky.  We used a loose watercolor technique which involved blending colors and bending our paper to cause the colors to drip.

Next, we practiced our brush technique for getting smooth edges as we painted our trees.  Finally, it was time for embellishments.  We used gold paint and jewels to embellish our Klimt trees.  Klimt is well known for his use of gold paint!

Learning Goals: I can...
- Create a tree in the style of Klimt
- Tell about Klimt
- Blend analogous (neighbor) colors using watercolor paint
- Paint smooth spiraling lines