Artful Thursday: Cool/Warm Colors & Frank Lloyd Wright

This week, Alex and I started something I'm going to call Artful Thursday. I honestly don't know if I've heard of that term or made it up myself, but I thought it sounded like fun! This week, we spent the morning doing art, but I might change it to the afternoon.

We started by talking about warm and cool colors. We used water colors and Alex made this "cool color" painting of a bird and a squirrel.

                                    

I copied what Mrs. Smith did on her post at Art with Mrs. Smith (which is where I got the idea) and did warm flowers.

Next, we talked about Frank Lloyd Wright. We recently listened to the book on tape of Chasing Vermeer by Balliet. Now we're listending to the sequel, The Wright 3, which is about Frank Lloyd Wright. In the story, they talk about Wright's building, the Robie House in Chicago. They also talk about his "art glass" windows. So, when I saw this post by Barb, the Harmony Art mom, I decided we'd do our own "twist" to this project and make Wright windows instead! (You can look at Barb's post for step by step instructions... thanks, Barb!)

I did print out my drawings from the site she linked to, Chantal's Stained Glass. I found that with the black glue, you really need very basic patterns so I skipped a lot of the lines. Also, Barb used transparencies for her clear surface while I used page protectors, since that is what I had handy.

                                              

The photos of Wright's work that I found were very neutrally colored, so I tried to recreate that. Since then, I've found that he really did some colorful work! By the way, according to this site by Julie Sloan, Wright did not like his glass work to be called "art glass." During the late 1800's, a building boom spawned a retailing invention, the mail order catalog. By 1910, those catalogs offered what was called 'art glass' windows. They were cheaply made and so Wright preferred the term "leaded glass."

Here's another site where you can see quite a few examples of Wright's Leaded Glass. They give examples from 4 of his buildings. I found it really interesting that he'd stick to a 'theme' in each building, so the glasswork would be similar inside of that particular building! I like the balloon and confetti theme of the Coonley House.  I might have to try something more colorful like that! I also found it interesting that Wright was one of the most prolific stained glass designers. He designed possibly 4,000 windows or more!!!

I enjoyed working on this dolphin 'stained glass', too, though it isn't a "Wright stained glass." I need to finish this one! And, we really did have fun creating art!