Brownie Painting Badge Activity

Our troop is working on the painting badge this week.  The first step to earning the badge is to discover various types of paintings and use those styles for inspiration.  We are not incorporating a field trip into this badge, so we won't be visiting a museum.  I thought about bringing in an art appreciation book and showing the girls the various styles.  I decided that might hold their attention about 30 seconds at best and that we needed something much more engaging.

I decided that we would play an active game with small versions of paintings in 4 distinct styles.  There are many more styles and some seem to overlap a bit to my novice eyes.  I made sure to choose styles (and examples) that are very easy to spot.  I collected examples of each style and put them together in collages or printing.  I've included:

• Pop Art
• Impressionism
• Cubism
• Realism.  

You can download and print these collages for use in any activity that you like.  Just click on the pictures below to download the full res files.

Here's how we are using them.  We will have an "art museum gallery" divided into four sections, each labeled with a painting style.  I plan to just put up 4 pieces of paper.  I will choose one example of each style to show the girls and put them in the proper section of the gallery.  The girls will be divided into teams and given the remaining cut out paintings to put up in the gallery.  We will do this as a relay race between and see which team can get all of their paintings displayed properly.

Do you have any other ideas for how to use these paintings with the girls?