Composite Head Collages - Art for Children - Arcimboldo

Materials: 

• Different colors of construction paper
• Glue sticks
• Scissors (child safe if appropriate)
• Magazines or catalogs (seed catalogs would be especially good) for cutting apart
• Books about the artist (see suggestions below)
• Video links and websites.

Project: This is a very simple, cut and glue, collage art project based on the composite heads of the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Review some, or all of the books, videos, and websites linked below with your children.

Cut out as many pictures of fruits, vegetables, flowers, or really any other items desired, as you can find in your magazines.  Older children can do their own cutting, but you will probably want to present younger children with a pre-cut selection of pictures.

Provide an assortment of construction paper or card stock sheets with glue sticks, and let the children go to town piecing together faces from the fruits and flowers.

Book Suggestions:

Hello, Fruit Face!  The Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo by Prestel Adventures in Art.

Sticker Art Shapes:  Arcimboldo by Louise Cognard - This entire series has been a big hit in our house.

Video Links:

Arcimboldo: Nature and Fantasy, from the National Art Museum's online resources for their Arcimboldo exhibit, narrated by Isabella Rossellini.

And, one more from YouTube, featuring teams of children designing different faces using the same basket of play fruit.  It's a little long and slow, but makes for good discussion of how the same items can be used create very different faces depending on the eye of the artist.

Website Suggestions:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo the Complete Works

The Denver Art Museum: a printable lesson plan for young children.

Do Art!: a very similar project to the one above, but with a little more detail to interest older children.

Let's Face It: A lesson plan with pictures of fruit and vegetables included to be cut out and used.

The Child's Paper Academy: A short lesson, some additional links, and more collages (theirs are very good).

An Arcimboldo Coloring Page

Art Projects for Kids:  A short lesson idea, and a printable 40''x48'' mural to color (downloadable for $5.00 - we've done one of her murals in the past, it was worth every penny).

This sort of project is an unschoolers dream, because it presents so many jumping off points for further study - symmetry, zoology, botany, the Age of Discovery, the Hapsburg Empire, Leonardo da Vinci, the modern surrealists, and so on and so on to wherever fancy and imagination takes you.

 It's great to be an homeschooler.