Hey everyone!
Today I am working on my favorite art/math project! Using Piet Mondrian’s work to understand math is nothing new. His geometric masterpieces lend themselves to learning so many math concepts. Even as I was preparing my samples for today, I came up with a few new variations that I am looking forward to trying once we get back to the classroom!
Supplies – This is a list of only some of the materials I used. You can simplify or expand as you like. The more you experiment, the better!
Paper, scissors, construction paper, ruler, glue, colored pencils, markers, colored sand, paint, Popsicle sticks, cardboard, graph paper etc.
You can create your own version of a Mondrian using paper and pencil, colored pencil, markers etc. You can also make a textured Mondrian by using sand, glitter, pop sticks and cardboard.
Steps – using a straight edge, draw rectangles and squares on your canvas (drawing surface, cardboard). Refer to Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow for inspiration. Here’s a link to some more of his work and about the artist – Mondrian for Kids – Slideshare
Once you have filled your canvas with the composition, choose your colors and add them. As you can see, the artist left white space and always used bold black lines to break up the canvas. Of course, you can be as creative as you like and add different colors too, just not green. Do you know why Mondrian didn’t use the color green?
Math activities – apart from the obvious geometry found in Mondrian’s work, we also see perpendicular lines, straight lines, intersecting and parallel lines. There is definitely one super easy math concept that your Mondrian inspired work can help you learn.
Finding the Area of a square or rectangle–
Supplies – graph paper ( print some out here free printable graph paper online), colored pencils, markers of crayons, ruler or any straight edge.
Steps – draw your Mondrian inspired artwork directly on the graph paper. before you color in your shapes, challenge yourself to find the area by counting the squares up (vertical) and across (horizontal) of the squares and rectangles. You can multiply (area = length x width or width x height) or even count each square in the shape. Here is a fun link to use for practice – Square Area Interactive.
Mondrian has inspired so many math activities and you can see a few of them at the links below, and enjoy some other math activities with artists like Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso!
Math with Mondrian, Calder and more
Here’s a really tough one to challenge yourself! –
Advanced Mondrian Math Puzzles
I’d love to see your Mondrian inspired work and how you extended this activity.
Google Arts and Culture App – Mondrian Composition with Grid #1
The Google Arts and Culture app has so many activities available that it’s impossible to list everything! Their content also changes so be sure to check it out the link quick!!
Be sure to check out the video for this project and post your creations @artoutofanything on FB and Instagram.
See you next week , stay healthy and create!
Patty
artoutofanything.com 