Picasso Cubism Mixed Media Art

We have been working for several days on these Picasso inspired cubism art works. We discovered that Picasso liked to represent guitars in many of his paintings so we set up a still life with our toy guitar.

Still life

First we used a ruler to divide the canvas up into sections. Then we drew in the still life. Each time we crossed into another section we "went a bit crazy" and distorted the image a bit by displacing the line.

Still life by L

Still life by R

The pencil lines were getting smudgy and rubbing off so we went over our drawing with permanent markers.

Next we chose some areas to collage using wrapping paper, scrapbook paper and tissue paper. Here's the process.

• Choose a section to collage and make a tracing of that section and all the shapes it contains. 
• Turn the tracing face down and scribble over the back of the lines with a soft pencil
• Choose a coloured paper, lay the tracing face up (scribbles down) on top
• Use a hard pencil to trace over the shape you want to cut out, the graphite from the scribbles will be transferred to the coloured paper.
• Cut the shape out
• Cover the section of the canvas with Mod Podge
• Lay the coloured piece over the top and then Mod Podge again over the top. 
• Repeat for other shapes in the section until it is completed. 

L's canvas after applying collage

R's canvas after applying collage

Next we used acrylics to paint the backgrounds of each section.

R works on the background

Next we painted the details with acrylics trying to match the colours to the pieces we had already collaged. Here's the finished result:

Mixed media by R age 5

Mixed media by L aged 3