Working on Pointilism

These students are working hard on pointillism...one dot at a time....

I've asked them to draw their design on scrap paper (without the dots) to practice what will work better through dots. Textured objects work well in pointillism; veggies and fruits, animals, nature and leaves, fish and shells. We are working on small paper(thank goodness).  Every point of color must be put on one dot at a time without scribbling or making small lines.  Take deep breaths everyone and place your dots slowly.  If you get frustrated, just take a break and come back to it later...


Here is some finished work....

Pointillism

Pointillism is our next project...

Pointillism
What is Pointillism?

Pointillism is a technique of painting in which a lot of tiny dots are combined to form a picture. The reason for doing pointillism instead of a picture with physical mixing is that, supposedly, physically mixing colors dulls them. Most of the painters of Seurat's time blended the colors to make a picture with a smoother feeling than Seurat's bright, dotty works.

Seurat

Student work

Student Work

Student work

When two colors are right next to each other your eye mixes them in a process called, "optical mixing." Using optical mixing rather than physical mixing can create a brighter picture. Painting a pointillist piece is a slow and painstaking process. Seurat's famous "A Sunday in the Park on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (more commonly known as "Sunday in the Park"), which covered a wall (81 inches by 120 inches), took him two years to complete. He was known for amazing devotion and concentration. The dots in a pointillist painting can be as small as 1/16 of an inch in diameter! Based on these measurements, "Sunday in the Park" has approximately 3,456,000 dots!

From Wikipedia: Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small distinct dots of color create the impression of a wide selection of other colors and optical blending. Aside from color "mixing" phenomena, there is the simpler graphic phenomenon of depicted imagery emerging from disparate points. Historically, Pointillism has been a figurative mode of executing a painting, as opposed to an abstract modality of expression.

The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones and is related closely to divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. It is a technique with few serious practitioners and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac and Cross. The term Pointillism was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation.