I gave each artist a large sheet of blue paper and smaller pieces of construction paper for the artists to cut organic shapes on. We played I Spy to find the Parrot and the Mermaid as well as talk about what types of organic shapes we saw in the collage. In this collage, Matisse uses different organic shapes that are leaf and plant like.

Next, I showed his collage, The Parrot and the Mermaid. Once she arranged them for him to his liking, he then glued them in place on paper. Sometimes Matisse had an assistant who painted paper for him so that he could cut into organic shapes, usually nature related, and then she would arrange them on the wall for him to see. Matisse still had the desire to create, so he began to draw with scissors and make paper cut outs. Matisse was a French painter who became ill when he was older and was confined to a bed. Then I introduced the collage art of Henri Matisse. Snippet makes him see that shape pictures do not just have to use the same geometric shapes, but shapes of all kinds and sizes. This is a book about how a Red Square does not see how an Organic shape, Snippet, can be part of his perfectly geometric collage picture. We began by reading the book Snippets, A Story About Paper Shapesby Diane Alber. For the last project in Lines and Shapes, I chose a collage picture as another way to review the different types of line and the differences between geometric and organic shapes.

Line and shape collage