Pointillism

This summer I had the pleasure of teaching children about art. One of the classes in this series of art classes focused on Pointillism. I showed the children a poster of a painting by Seurat and explained that the technique involved using dots of paint to create a picture. The students then painted their own pictures using paint and Q-tips. The Q-tips help the students to make dots, rather than using a paint brush. I also helped students to look into the idea of using dots in our everyday lives. Newspapers, magazines and computers use "dots" to build an image. DPI or Dots Per Inch is a clear example of the use of dots in images today. The more dots there are, the better the picture looks. The students use magnifying glasses to look at the dots in newspaper and magazine samples. Students can actually see the difference in the space between dots in these two samples. Newsprint uses a lower DPI than magazines and that is why the students will see the dots more clearly on the newsprint samples. The idea of printed materials being created by dots gives students the basic idea of how the computer and printers works. A digital camera will build the image out of pixels (dots) which in turn are printed in DPI on a page. The printer actually drops dots of ink onto the page to form the complete picture. The kids really enjoyed using the magnifying glass to see what else was made of dots. They also grasped the idea of creating a picture from smaller pieces. With every press of the Q-tip they were building their pictures.