Klimt artist study

I’d seen Gustav Klimt’s artwork before. It’s one many people enjoy parodying, and like many famous artists, you can see his original work and the work someone found to be fun. Our Gustav Klimt artist study was part of our Austria unit (one of our geography lessons), but it’s also a fun history lesson as his art style was a reflection of the times.

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Gustav Klimt Artist Study

I’m glad you asked that, pretty much all I knew about him before was the famous work “The Kiss,” which I didn’t even know the name of, I just recognized it. But thanks to a fun picture book, Klimt and His Cat, and a few videos I learned quite a lot more.

It amazes me how so many of these more stylized artists also have a thorough grounding in more traditional artwork, but that’s not what they’re known for. Prior to learning more, I hadn’t known he has several paintings in a classic more realistic style.

It’s also interesting to me, he’s more or less from the same time period as the Impressionists, but is not part of their style.

Gustav Klimt art lesson

I swear when we did this Klimt artist study we used a video to create our project, but I just skimmed through several different videos, and for the life of me I cannot figure out just which video it was we used. None of them match what we did, so this is the closest project to what we did. I’ll tell you how we modified our project.

Klimt project supplies

Austria printable (in the subscriber portion, join my newsletter) or plain paper, crayons, watercolors, paintbrush

We drew out our tree with the crayons and added lots and lots of dots making occasional references to the original artwork.

There was quite a lot of joking about how to best draw our trees, and generally how much our trees are just a little bit different.

Then we grabbed our watercolor paint and turned it into a resist artwork.

Then we each picked out a color to paint over our work and create the glorious background that is nicely mottled.

I think that is why I didn’t like any of the projects I saw. They were all one-sided, either crayons OR paint, and I like the look of the combination.

Also, I have to admit, the sheer time it would take to color the background with a crayon sounds tedious.

And that’s our Klimt artist study

I know we could have done more, but I’ve found my kids don’t enjoy a super in-depth study, and long projects. They like an artist study we can complete in an afternoon.

I have to admit I do too because I rarely remember to come back later to the project and finish it.

Come check out more artist studies

• Henri Rousseau artist study
• King Tut grave art study
• Titian artist study
• Picasso artist study
• Artist Studies