reggie laurent "shapely" abstractions

Reggie Laurent is a modern art painter who lives in the Atlanta, Georgia area. He often works on black canvas, painting his organic shapes and squiggles first in white and then covering them in colored acrylic.

My fifth graders have viewed the work of Reggie Laurent, and while they would LOVE to emulate his stule of acrylic-on-canvas, it just isn't in our budget! SOOOO, we did the next best thing: cut paper on black. Students used paper from the scrap box and glued it onto a sheet of 12x18 black paper. We then used colored oil pastel to layer and doodle designs on top of the cut paper. A white "thread" of oil pastel was then woven through the remaining negative black spaces to tie the whole project together!

This was really a "no-brainer" for my fifth graders and they liked learning about Laurent and his style of painting! For more about Reggie Laurent, visuals, , and a great interview to share with your students, click over to Art Is Fun to read more!