This week at art club was circus-tastic! We were inspired by the vivid impressionist illustrations of Henri De Toulouse – Lautrec.
Tolouse Lautrec was born in France into an aristocratic family, he became one of the most famous impressionist artists. He lived in Montmartre, an area of Paris famous for its many artists, writers, and performers. These people became the subjects of many of his works of art. He became well-known for capturing performers in their working environment and bustling crowd scenes.
We looked at the way Lautrec painted in flat, simple areas of colour with strong outlines. We noticed he often used garish and artificial colours, bright orange hair and electric green backdrops were popular themes in his portraits and posters
As well as dancers who performed at the world famous cabaret The Moulin Rouge Toulouse Lautrec also had a passion for the circus. He created many circus themed illustrations for French magazines.
The group’s challenge this week was to create their own circus illustration based on vintage photographs of trapeze artists, strong-men, clowns and uni-cyclists. We drew out the acrobats carefully using the grid technique and then added vivid colours and impressionist marks with chalk pastels.
The results were simply fantastic and we were very impressed with the high standard of drawing skills displayed by all groups!
Our Arts Academy took the workshop a step further by contextualizing their drawings, adding hand-drawn text to transform it it into a circus poster.
Well done everybody terrific job!
Truro Art Club 