Toddler Art Exploration – Mondrian

I have been very excited to hear about this series from Red Ted Art. J loves art and craft and likes looking at the painting and pictures that we have around the house but we haven’t really spoken about art in any detail so this was a perfect opportunity to focus on his love of art and crafts and his interest in looking at pictures. We have chosen Mondrian as our starting point – J is very into shapes and colours and instead of focusing on techniques I was able to use Mondrian’s cubism style to our advantage.

Looking and talking about Mondrian

I don’t have any art books, and our library doesn’t appear to have any suitable for a toddler so instead I searched the Internet for images that we could look at and talk about, I did a bit of research about where he lived and worked as well. The use of red, blue and yellow in the images was a great way to introduce primary colours to J and we had some great fun doing some colour mixing to see what other colours could be made from those colours and proving that we couldn’t make them from any other colours as well (I will put a post up about our colour mixing within the next few weeks as we are still exploring it in different ways).

We also looked at the shapes that were in Mondrian paintings – the fact that we had rectangles and squares that we could see some BIG and others LITTLE (we’re very into opposites at the moment). Looking at one of the sheets that I had printed out we identified squares, little rectangles and big rectangles on the painting as well as the colours involved. It was interesting to see that he decided that little rectangles were those that had short top edge and big ones had a big top edge it didn’t matter how long they were or the area that they covered.

At school I did some work on Mondrian in Technology lessons and we made wooden blocks with perspex outlines and wood dyes as one of the projects and although I thought it would be great to use paint as Mondrian did I wanted to first create something similar that J could do on his own and form a focus for more Art exploration of Mondrian. So looking at some of our recent art works stained glass window art was something that J had really enjoyed and it would be a great way to produce some Mondrian inspired art that he could do.

What you need for creating a Mondrian inspired stained glass window

Sticky Back Plastic (Contact Paper)
Tissue paper in red, white, blue and yellow
Black construction paper or card (we used card as it produces a stronger colour)
Sticky Tape

How we made our Mondrian inspired stained glass window

Prior to getting J down to creating the art I planned ahead and cut up tissue paper into small squares and some strips of black card to create the grid with. I also stuck down a piece of sticky back plastic with sticky tape onto the table in front of his seat. I find it’s easier to plan ahead with J when it comes to doing projects that need some concentration and discussion as we create.

With the computer in front of us we looked at one of Mondrian’s paintings and talked about the black lines on them. J then started to form a grid with the black card laying long pieces first and then adding short pieces at different points. He would hand me a strip and ask me to make it small to go across the gap and then place it on. He kept saying about making it like Ondran’s painting!

As J added the tissue paper to each of the rectangles we talked about the colours and how on the computer the colours weren’t the same in two rectangles next to each other. He loves colouring in pictures at the moment so explaining that we were colouring in the squares with tissue paper instead of crayons was a great way to get him to understand what we were doing and how to go about it.

When he had “finished” we stuck another piece of sticky back plastic on top of the picture and smoothed it out. Then using sticky tape I stuck it on our dinning room window (our dinning room is our craft area) as this is where we do a lot of craft projects inside and the window has a great view to the garden as well.