Painting - inspired by Henri Rousseau and the Post-Impressionists

In Session 1, we learned about the great artist Henri Rousseau and how he was inspired to paint pictures of jungle scenes even when he had never been to a jungle. We learned how people laughed at his work and called it 'simplistic' but how this never stopped the artist from coninuing to practise his art. We loved his resilience!

As an introduction, we created a double-paged spread in our art books of information for this topic.

The inspiration for our finished piece is Henri Rousseau's 'Surprised!' We love the expression of the tiger and how the painter created a storm with his brushstrokes. 

First we needed to create a background - we thought about different weather scenes - stormy, sunny, cloudy, moody.

We painted our backgrounds in watercolours and worked creatively - no drawing first! Every background was different!

Next, we experimented with a narrow range of colours to create different types of green and created plant leaves for our foreground. Then we added our next layer - the middle ground , thinking about perspective.