Preschool Art Lessons Part 2: Bruegel and Cool/Warm Colors

(This is an ongoing series of casual art exploration I am going through with a few preschoolers. 

You can see my first post here.)

This week we continued to use the Usborne Children's Book of Art and do a little learning about Bruegel.

Because, understandably, as soon as they arrive, my little students want to begin getting messy, I reserve some of our "history" until later in the lesson. We started out by watching this little video about warm and cool colors (which they giggled about!).

I pulled out the liquid watercolors and we began painting our color wheel. I used some printables from  an art lesson on "Hot Dogs and Cool Cats" from TPT that you can find here.

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After mixing our paints and enjoying the process of seeing new colors come alive, we talked about how cool it is that you can divide the color wheel in half and have one side with WARM colors and the other side with COOL colors. We also talked about what colors make us feel certain things.

Then we colored our dogs with whatever choice of warm color they wanted, and our cats with whatever cool color they chose. The lesson has some other activities that could extend this activity, but today we just kept it to these. We may re-visit some of them other activities later. 

We began working on this project from Deep Space Sparkle, using warm and cool colors. The girls all colored/painted two sheets of paper: one with nothing but warm colors, the other with nothing but cool colors. 

While they were drying, we watched a little video about Bruegel and I encouraged the girls to shout out when they noticed warm colors or cool colors in his work. 

Next week, we'll finish up their warm & cool piece and begin on our next topic (Rembrandt, Veneer, and Everyday Scenes)! 

I really liked this power point and simple instructions on atmospheric perspective with Bruegel, and I had planned on us doing it too, but we just ran out of time. We will probably use it when we study Caspar Friedrich and oceans/mountains. 

This post had lots of links and good info on Pieter Bruegel, too.