Wayne Thiebaud (1920 - )

Art Masters Lesson Plan

(Class Painting and Individual Art Work)

Biography:

Wayne Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1920. His father worked, among other things, as a mechanic, an inventor, a rancher, and a milkman. When Thiebaud was six months old his family moved to California where he spent a lot of time on his grandfather’s farm. His first art projects were with his mother on rainy days and with his uncle who was a cartoonist.
For many years Thiebaud did odd jobs like sign painting, cartooning, and illustrating movie posters. One summer he even worked in the animation department of Walt Disney studios. When he was a soldier in World War II, he created a comic strip called Wingtips. He was almost thirty years old before he realized that he could make a career of painting. When he returned to college to learn about art, he was offered a teaching job and spent many years teaching art in California universities.

Many wonder if he spent time working in the food industryy, and, in fact, he did. As a young man in Long Beach, CA he worked in a café named Mile High and Red Hot, where “Mile High” was ice cream and “Red Hot” was a hot dog.
At forty years old, he began his series of still-life paintings of food. Drawing with color and correcting his drawings with darker color led to a halo effect around his objects. This outline of pure, intense colors has become known as halation and adds to the vibrancy of Thiebaud’s paintings. He uses bright colors, thick rapid brush strokes, and simplified shapes to paint common, everyday food. Many of Thiebaud’s most famous paintings from the 1950s show common objects from American life like rows and rows of cakes and pastries that might be seen in a cafeteria or bakery window. He painted cakes, pies, donuts, gumball machines, toys, hats, sandwiches, and plates of pancakes. Filling his canvas with a single cafeteria-style cake or pie elevates it to an absurd status that is part of his humor. At times he repeats the desserts over and over again, giving the impression that there is no end to these sweet things.
Thiebaud’s paintings show simple shapes, shadows, thick brushstrokes, and strong colors. When painting a cake, Thiebaud says that he is painting a picture of an object that has already been painted. It’s as though he transforms the thick rich texture of oil paint into whipped cream or icing as he spreads it across the desserts on his canvas.

Thiebaud did not stop with cakes and pies. His paintings of San Francisco streets and California river landscapes are vividly colorful and so realistic that many look like abstract patterns.

Pop Art became an important art movement in America in the 1960s, and Thiebaud’s cake paintings inspired other artists to look at common objects in new ways.
Retired from teaching, Wayne Thiebaud lives in California and is still working as a painter in his 80’s.

Lesson:

Part One: Individual Paintings of Gumball Machines

YOU WILL NEED

  • White drawing paper (I put painting paper for each classin the 2nd grade box))
  • Pencils
  • Tempera or acrylic paints (in cabinet)
  • Paint brushes (cabinet/art room)
  • Containers of water for rinsing brushes (cabinet/art room)
  • Sponges/paper towels for drying brushes
  • Trays for mixing paint colors (Styrofoam or plastic trays from the grocery store work well or paper plates)
  • Examples of Wayne Thiebaud’s food paintings (in Art Masters files)
  • Thiebaud prints:THIE-1 Cakes (1963) and THE-2 Pie Counter (1963)

Preparation

  • Become familiar with the life and paintings of Wayne Thiebaud.
  • Gather examples of his food paintings.
  • Set out pencils and drawing paper.
  • Set out paints, brushes, containers of water, and sponges.

How to Begin

  • Display the examples of Thiebaud’s paintings. As the children look closely, tell them about his life and his work. Explain to the children that they will be making paintings of gumball machines, using Wayne Thiebaud’s style.
  • Point out the characteristics of Thiebaud’s food paintings. He uses common everyday foods that might be found in a cafeteria, bright colors, and thick brushstrokes. He invented halation, where he intensifies his colors by drawing the outlines of his food with lines of bright colors. He either painted a single food filling the whole canvas, giving it a humorous stature, or repeated the foods in a very ordered composition as though there were no end to them.
  • Have the children lightly sketch in pencil the gumball machines to fill their papers
  • PROJECT: draw a gumball machine and collage in the gumballs
    Step1: WORKING TOGETHER: draw a square at the bottom of your page
    Step2: Draw in a small oval at the bottom of the square
    Step3: draw a rectangle at the top of the square
    Step4: Draw a large circle on top of the rectangle
    Step5: using paint: color the square red
    Step6: color the small oval black
    Step 7: shade in with black on the right side of the square making a shadow. Make the shadow run off the page in the style of Mr. Thiebaud
    Step8: Add lines on the rectangle
    Step9: paint in gumballs
    Step10: continue until you have five minutes left
    Step11: using white paint add in the white highlights on the gumballs
  • Set the paintings aside to dry

Note: You may want to limit the paitning portion to the class painting. In that case, colored pencils or crayons would be a good substitute although the kids would not be able to replicate Thiebaud’s thick paint effect.

You may also discuss the ideas of symmetry and fractions. These are both good themes to work with when discussing Thiebaud and ones that are being introduced in second grade.

Examples of k-second grade art work


("Three Machines" (1963), by Wayne Thiebaud. De YoungMuseum, San Francisco)

Part Two: Class Painting of Cupcakes

While the children are working on their individual paintings of gumball machines, small groups of kids can be called to a separate area to help create the class painting of cupcakes.

Preparation:

Please send a messy day note home with the children the day before your lesson, the acrylic paints do not wash out! There are smocks in the art room that Mrs. Rinker is happy to loan out.

Each class has a canvas on top of the art masters filing cabinet. Please take your class canvas and check it off the list. Print your class teacher on the back of the canvas. Using Painters tape (I will leave some in the second grade box), tapearound the edges of the canvas. This taped area will be where the children sign their names once the painting has dried (or you can have each child sign their name before you tape it off) Also, leave a space for the teacher to sign her name and the year. In light pencil, grid the canvas into 12 individual squares. In each square sketch a cupcake. Two children can work on a cupcake.

The paints are in the storage closet. Please bring newspaper to cover the area.

Tips:

There have been a number of emails regarding useful hints for these projects. It is helpful to read over these for use in the class painting.

Sharpies

Sharpies work fine. Use the fine point (fat) Sharpies. Art Masters has a variety of colors in the supply drawer in the filing cabinet. I did try the artist's pen, which also worked, but we have plenty of Sharpies. Note that filling in a block of color in Sharpie didn’t work too well. Some of the canvas didn’t cover perfectly. Paint works better for that.

Border

I drew borders at 1, 1.5 and 2 inches. One inch seems to be enough room for students to comfortably sign their names, but you can decide what will work best with your project.

Pencil

It�s no problem outlining in pencil, but watch out for smudges. It’s probably best to start at the top and work down. I was able to erase pencil markings without problems. Paint covered the pencil well.

Painter�s Tape

Wrap the tape around the corner of the canvas, since painter’s tape tends to lose some adhesion on canvas. It lifts without damaging the images underneath. I left a roll of tape in the blue crate.

Sag

The canvas does sag a bit in the middle. Please try to bring some old magazines that can be placed under the canvas during the project. This will prevent an enthusiastic student from either stretching a canvas too far or even breaking it. Some support will probably make moving the marbles around the canvas easier for the Pollock lesson.

Color study

There is a beautiful color study in a large envelope on top of the print cabinet. If you have been assigned a warm or cool color, please take a look at it. If anyone knows who created it, please let me know. I would like to give credit to whoever created this wonderful teaching aid!

Supplies

Painter’s tape, marbles, cotton swabs and paper plates are in the blue crate on top of the Art Masters print cabinet. The lesson plans and biographical information on the artists are in the crate as well. (I will purchase more of the plastic craft envelopes for other lesson plans. I think these will work much, much better than the current system.)

Our supplies in the closet have migrated back to the wall next to the door. Paint, brushes, craft sticks and containers for water can be found there. Sharpies are in the filing cabinet in the second drawer, labeled “supplies”.

Finished canvases

Please leave finished canvases on top of the print cabinet to dry. I will start hanging the finished work soon.

Absentees

I received an email from the grandmother who had painted with the classes in the past. She is so pleased that Arts Night is back and that you are working with the students on class paintings! Her suggestion for absentees: leave room for a signature from every student. Return to the classroom when the child is there and have him/her add the name and something to the painting, even if it’s just a few dots of color or a chance to straighten a line. Returning may be difficult for some volunteers. Please email me if that is the situation and I will stop by the classroom to have the student add to the painting. Just let me know the name of the teacher and student.

Angela passed along a great idea for working with acrylic paint. She mixed it with gel medium, a product that acrylic artists use to extend paint and give it a viscosity that is similar to oil paint. I purchased some this morning for Art Masters and put it in the tub with the acrylic paints. Use a craft stick (we have plenty in the supply closet) to mix it with the paint. (Experiment with what works best.) You will be able to get some texture into the painting when this is added. A couple of things:

  • Gel medium dries quickly, so make sure to wash out brushes right away (just water is fine)
  • It looks like hand cream, but it will dry translucent. Do not use it for the Pollock/marble painting project since it will make the paint too thick
  • A little goes a long way
  • It will be useful for other Art Masters projects since it works as a glue or varnish and is great for decoupage
  • There are paper plates in the blue crate on top of the Art Masters print cabinet for using as palettes

Some tips from Mrs. Kenney’s volunteers:

  • They gridded off the border, squares and very basic circles in pencil prior to class
  • They did not pre-paint any background
  • Students wrote their names around the border in Sharpie first
  • They left room for the teacher to write her name and the class year
  • They put blue painters tape over the border before painting
  • Two students at a time worked on painting. The rest of the class worked on a similar design, working simply with paper and crayons
  • The paint was well on the way toward drying by the time the lesson was finished -- only the thickest areas had visibly wet paint

Wayne Thiebaud, “Cake Window”