So many dots!

Pointillism is a neat way of painting. The word itself: Point (dots) and ism (stlye) is exactly what it means, the style of dots. French artist George Seurat invented this time-consuming painting technique. Look at Seurat’s painting above from far away, it looks like a normal landscape painting doesn’t it? But once you get close to it you can see that the image is actually made out of lots and lots of tiny dots. Can you imagine how long that took?

When you view from a distance your eye blends the dots together, this is called optical blending. You can see this in Seurat’s painting The Eiffel Tower (pictured on the right). When you look at it, it looks orange, but really he only used tiny dots of red and yellow which your eyes blend to make the color orange. Instead of mixing the paint himself, he is making your eye do all the work!

This technique of optical blending, dividing the colors instead of blending them, was also called divisionism. Divisionism included pointillism, but an artist could create this optical illusion with more than the use of dots. For example, Vincent van Gogh used divisionism in his famous painting The Starry Night, instead of using dots he used lines. If you look closely you can see the lines from his brush everywhere, it makes it seem like the sky is moving.

If you want to practice pointillism and divisionism yourself, just print this coloring activity and use markers for the dots and lines: Artist Activity

Look how ours turned out:

Hang them up when you’re done and marvel at your masterpieces!