Create this project along with Alyssa!
Watch this video right here or on the Museum’s YouTube Channel.
Project Overview:
For this week’s Heckscher at Home Kids Edition, we will learn about Long Island Biennial 2020 artist Thomas Germano! Together, looking closely at his artwork, we will find out how to make art look more 3-D! After getting inspired by his piece Long Island Expressway, we will get creative and make our own artwork!
Materials:
- white paper and black paper
- pencil
- eraser
- ruler
- scissors
- glue
- oil pastels/colored pencils/crayons/markers
Key Concepts:
- silhouette
- landscape/cityscape
- details
- one-point perspective
- horizon line
- background
- foreground
- shadows and highlights
Discussion:
Thomas Germano is one of 52 artists featgured in the Long Island Biennial 2020. Let’s take a closer look at his work and make observations about details that you notice!
When we’re looking at a painting of an outdoor place, we describe that as a landscape. Germano’s painting Long Island Expressway is a place many of us are familiar with. What time of day did he choose to capture in this scene? The colors make it look like a beautiful sunset with pastel shades of purple and orange. When we’re looking at the highway signs and the trees lining the road, you will notice we cannot see any details. This is because when the sun is going down, the shadows block the details and create a silhouette.
Thomas uses one-point perspective to make his painting look more realistic. In one-point perspective, all lines (the road) converge to a single point on the horizon line, where the earth meets the sky. When artists paint things closer to us in the foreground, they appear bigger. When they paint things further away, in the background, they appear smaller. You can see it not only in the road, but the clouds and trees also become smaller as they go further back in the painting.
Let’s get creative! Where does your road lead to? What colors will you include in your sunset?
Share!
Please share photos of your finished works of art with us on social media and check back soon for our next project! #HeckscheratHome #MuseumfromHome
