Alma Thomas was an African-American artist who lived in Washington DC. Alma is best known for the colorful and abstract paintings that she started creating after retiring from a 35-year career teaching art.

Alma Thomas

She began at first by creating what is called “Color Field” paintings A Color Field painting has large areas of flat, solid color spread across the pictures without a lot of marks or textures.

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She then started adding textures to her paintings by using small dot like shapes to fill in the canvas. This changed the look of the artwork and made them more interesting to her.

She used this specific way of painting throughout the rest of her career and it became her special style.

Many of her paintings also have circle or line patterns. She was inspired to create these paintings by the 1969 moon landing. This is when astronauts landed on the moon for the very first time. Seeing photos brought back to earth caused her to create large art that looked like space with the texture and patterns of colors.

Her work became very famous all over the world, in fact there was even an art piece of hers up at the White House! This piece is titled “ Resurrection” and was hung in the White House Dining Room.

Today we will be creating our own artwork inspired by Alma Thomas. We’ll be imagining what we could see if we were out in space or on the moon. We'll create our artwork using the same technique that Alma used-that of using small dots of color to fill in the paper.

Alma Thomas Artwork