Pablo Picasso artist study

Sooo….. I may have lost this Picasso art lesson for years and then found it while looking through unwritten posts. As proof, my boys were shorter than me when we did geography lesson or maybe it was an art lesson. I’m not sure if this was part of our Spain study or part of our study of Modern History and it’s an Artist Study. Apparently I found the pictures from this Picasso lesson just as confusing as I find Picasso’s artwork.

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Resources for our Picasso art lesson

Lumpito and the Painter from Spain (this looks to be out of print, so keep an eye out for it at used bookstores, or if you’re local to me it’s at the library, by the by my Spain book list is now up in the Subscriber page), And Picasso Painted Guernica, Pablo Picasso, Getting to Know the Artist (I love this series and use it whenever I can)

Great videos on Picasso

I’m going to tell you, I’m not an art expert. I can teach you about the history of some artists, but honestly, if you get anything more modern than DaVinci and I’m going to spout a few words and then be clueless.

Do you know what I know about Picasso?

Guernica.

My freshman history teacher taught us all about Guernica, and how it was so controversial that 50 years after it was created, it still had guards standing in front of it to make sure no one defaced it.

That’s my background knowledge before starting our Picasso lesson.

Oh, and he had a blue period and painted some really weird looking portraits of naked women. Which is not a lot to build an art lesson on.

That’s why I headed over to Youtube and grabbed a couple of videos to go with my library books. The first one is great for junior high and high schoolers and their Picasso art lesson, but the second video, everyone needs to watch that one.

Only watch this video with older kids, Guernica is one of Picasso’s most controversial pieces of art, so it could bother elementary-aged kids.

However, everyone should watch this video. It’s a great quick introduction to Picasso.

What makes Picasso unique

If you watched the video up above you know Picasso was gifted. He created amazing artwork in classical styles at a young age, but he slowly evolved into a new style.

That’s what makes Picasso unique. He created a brand-new style of artwork.

Cubism.

Totally going to admit, I’m not a fan of Cubism. I can admire the skill involved, and how it works, but it’s not what I’m going to put up in my house.

What our Picasso art lesson looked like

We followed the lesson from Masterpiece Art Society.

Supplies for that lesson: Mixed Media Trading Cards (I like this size for not being intimidating for kids), oil pastels, vegetable oil, paintbrush

Alicia does a great step by step lesson explaining how to make your own artwork. My kids always like when she speeds up her video to complete it faster.

I don’t know why they think it’s so hilarious.

In her video, she imitated one of Picasso’s most famous works.

I’ve learned I have happier kids if I don’t require them to make an exact replica of the lesson. They created various different cubist style portrait drawing with their oil pastels.

Side note, I love working with oil pastels, the colors come on nice and smooth, and cover so well. When I was in college I discovered oil pastels and made a portrait of a friend’s engagement picture which I was super proud of.

The kids’ most favorite part of this lesson was the final step. After drawing our creations and putting any details in with a Sharpie (because Sharpies make everything better).

Hmmm…. I think this picture is not from the Picasso art lesson, as she’s using watercolors (I wish I could find the same watercolor set, I really like that one in the picture).

Oops.

Back to that favorite part of the Picasso art lesson

Their favorite part of this lesson was when we went over our oil pastels with the oil.

Now, I’d never really taken formal art lessons at the time we did this. I’d had fun with some of Alisha’s lessons (review of her Mixed Media class), but that was in mixed media, a style I was vaguely familiar with. This was getting into some actual art techniques that I’d never done before and it was super cool to do.

Brushing the oil over the oil pastels was amazingly cool.

End results of our Picasso art lesson

These are our different projects.

You can see my blue man over on the right.

Brushing the oil over the oil pastel made it look rather like a watercolor and caused the colors to move around a bit. It was really very cool.

More fun art history lessons

• Lascaux Cave Paintings
• Queen Elizabeth art history lesson
• The Icon Controversy
• Henri Matisse art lesson
• How to make art lessons happen