Imitating artists can help kids see what makes that artist’s style unique. Observing how an artist uses the seven elements of art can give us a peek into the window of their creativity. While preparing to travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, we examined the work of Georgia O’Keeffe!

Step 1: Learn about the artist and their style.

To get started, we learn about an artist by gathering books from our local library, watching a video about the artist, and scrolling images of their work from museums where much of their work is featured. In our case, we were getting ready for a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico and planned to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Step 2: Imitate the style with our own interpretations.

As we look through examples of the artist’s work, each of us choose one to imitate. I specifically ask the kids questions that help them see how the artist uses the seven elements of art: line, shape, form, space, value, texture, and color. For O’Keeffe, here were some of the questions I asked and the kids’ answers:

• What do you notice about the lines in the painting? (spiral, doesn’t have dark black outlines)
• What shapes do you see? (circles, triangles, blocks of color)
• As you imitate, what colors do you notice you’re choosing? (She uses a lot of greens/ light and dark of each color)

Step 3: Compare the imitations.

The kids made insightful observations and when we discussed how the different paintings we imitated were similar and different, they noticed patterns across all of her work that made her style unique. For example, they noticed that she paints flowers close up. They were curious to see how her depictions of New Mexico would match with the terrain when we get to visit.

In our browsing, we came across a video that showed how to examine a flower close up as O’Keeffe often did and amplify the size to demonstrate the detail by using a wide variety of values. We tried it out using a small cutout frame, and had a blast comparing our various artistic interpretations of the same fall mum.

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What museum are you planning to make a trip to soon? Is there a prominent artist that you could examine using these Artistic Imitation steps with your kids?

If you try it out, we’d love to hear how it goes in the comments below!