Reggie Laurent is more of a contemporary artist but, a great one for kids to copy.(See more of his work here)

His style is abstract, his colors are vivid and the children can quite relate to the way he designs his artwork.

Below is a snapshot of 2 of his pieces of artwork.

He usually uses a black background and has a unifying white line around all his pieces of art he paints.

I was able to come up with 2 different activities to imitate the style of Reggie Laurent.

The first one is using pencil, oil pastels and finishes off with white paint.

I gave the kids a piece of black construction paper and a  pencil and told them to create various shapes around the whole page.

There are always sample of the artists work around for the children to get an idea of what style to copy.

After they had their shapes I gave them oil pastels and had them color them in.

They also saw that they could add designs to the shapes they colored with different colors.

After they finished with the oil pastels they took white paint and think markers and surrounded their shapes with the paint just like Reggie does.
For the second project I decided to do collage. I used black paper as a background again since that seems to be Reggies modus operandi.

This time I had them cut organic shapes out of white paper first. They could either use a pencil to draw them first or cut them free form.

After they had the cut out they pasted them down in a pleasing arrangement.Then they outlined each shape with a marker leaving enough space in the border for decoration.

They first decorated the borders of each shape with markers and then painted in their shapes with paint.
I actually don’t remember if we used tempera or watercolors, but I guess either one works.

I’m wondering if this activity could also be done with the children painting a canvas black first like Reggie does?