Artist: GRANDMA MOSES

During the winter months, we studied the artwork of American Folk Artist

GRANDMA MOSES.

She was a self-taught artist who began her painting career in her seventies. GRANDMA MOSES lived to be 101 years old and created many paintings during that time. She enjoyed painting the people and activities most familiar to her and her country lifestyle. Below is one of her many paintings we studied.

We decided to create our own version of a GRANDMA MOSES inspired winter LANDSCAPE.

 We began by painting a winter sky using water color.

When the painting dried, we glued a torn piece of white paper to the bottom for the snow.

This created a HORIZON LINE where the earth and the sky meet.

Next, we created two houses from cut paper. 

One house was big, the other was small.

We learned we could create an illusion of NEAR and FAR by placing the large house close to the bottom, and the small house close to the HORIZON LINE.

There's a difference between tearing and ripping paper. 

Tearing the paper allowed us to control the direction of the tear.

We used these pieces of torn paper to create winter trees.

The rough edges of the torn paper looked just like bumpy tree bark.

 We made some trees large for the FOREGROUND (near).

We created tiny trees for the BACKGROUND (far).

 Last, we created a person for our pictures.

 We had to make sure we dressed them warmly!!

 Cutting out those tiny hats, boots, mittens, jackets and snow pants was a challenge!

We think GRANDMA MOSES would like our winter LANDSCAPES as much as we like hers!