Try this fun Paul Klee art for kids by collaging cities onto a colorful chalk background. A wonderful art activity inspired by Paul Klee’s art by Catalina Gutierrez of Redviolet Studio.
You know I love to pair an art activity with a good ol’ children’s book. These always inspire me to try new projects.
“The Cat and the Bird” is a lovely book with brilliant illustrations based on Paul Klee’s artworks. Just browsing through it got my creative mind to work with so many ideas that could be explored based on the story and its colorful pages.
After reading the book to the children, we talked about cities and all the things they can find in them.
Tall buildings, small or big houses, people, trees, offices, factories, animals, etc. The list was endless and a good starting point to get them interested in the topic we’d be working on.
Our project was making our own cities inspired by Paul Klee using different mediums.
Paul Klee Art for Kids – Colorful City Collages
MATERIALS
- black Sharpies
- chalk pastels
- heavy weight white paper
- colored paper
- scissors
- glue stick
- sticker paper (or sticker tags)
INSTRUCTIONS
How to create colorful cities inspired by Paul Klee’s art
1. Create backgrounds for your Paul Klee art
Start by bringing out the pastels and the paper and invite the kids to cover the whole surface. This will be the background to their cities.
Some kids chose one single color, while others used multiple colors to make lines and other shapes that represented buildings, trees, mountains or houses.
Tip: Show the kids how they can use their fingers to smudge the chalk pastels after applying them onto the paper.
2. Cut out shapes for your cities
Once they are done covering all of the paper with the pastels, bring out colored paper and scissors.
I pre-cut a few shapes like triangles, squares and rectangles. I wanted to show the kids how they could start building their houses or buildings and add them to the paper.
Some children cut their own shapes and made their unique structures that would then become part of their cities.
3. Glue buildings & houses onto paper
After all of the shapes are cut out, begin gluing them onto the paper. These form the different houses and buildings to make the cities interesting and all so different from one another.
I asked my students, “Ok, so who is going to live in these cities you are designing?” And “are there any animals living in these buildings? Or maybe people? Children?”
This sparked their imagination to go on to the next step.
4. Create windows & doors
I brought in some sticker paper (you can use sticker labels too) and invited them to cut windows and doors and draw on these with black sharpies.
They drew boys, girls, babies, emojis, LOL’s, cats, puppies… you name it!
Finally, they stuck them to their cities and voila! Every city was special and unique!
I hope you try this Paul Klee art project for kids, it’s really easy to set up and the process is lots of fun!
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