Pointillism Birds with 5th Grade Students

Here are a few pointillism birds by grade 5 students, modeled after art by Georges Seurat. The most successful students mixed several colors to make each hue, much like Seurat did. This was a difficult concept for some students to understand, especially when using a color like red (I encouraged them to mix some pink dots in) or black (adding brown, purple, dark blue, and dark green works well). Mixing several different colors of blue together to make blue was easy for most students, but when there's really only one shade of the color, the students struggled.

When using secondary or tertiary colors, I really encouraged the students to mix in the root colors, instead of just using the desired color. For example, green can have yellow and blue mixed in. I really worked on that concept with a pointillism color-mixing worksheet I developed. The students completed the worksheet before beginning their bird picture.

This year, I purchased a box of Mr. Sketch markers to use in addition to the Crayola markers I had from last year. Using both boxes together worked well, as the students had more colors to choose from.

Over all, I am quite pleased with results from this lesson this year. I think having two brands of markers helped, as the colors vary slightly. The more different colored dots, the merrier! Here are some pictures from last year, using only Crayola markers.