Keep Calm and Paint On

for now at least. 

Found Here

At the end of Term Two I think we were all a little strung out, ready to be done with our awesome Value Drawings.  

Since Term Three started last week, we have been talking about color and painting. 

Its been like night and day in my classroom. Painting appears to have this awesome calming effect on my high school students.

We're not really inventing anything new here. First, we used acrylic primary colors to paint a color wheel, discussing primary, secondary and intermediate colors. 

Yes, this is something that I hope my high school students already know, but some don't. 

Currently in my city, elementary school students have Art every other week for about 45 minutes. This amounts to about 15 hours of Art a year. Middle school students have Art about once a week. At least one of those schools does not have a sink... so some students NEVER paint until high school. 

I know painting has nothing to do with color and color mixing, but I do feel that it is one of the best mediums for explaining the concept. 

After completing the "practice" color wheel, students have been asked to "reinvent" the wheel, using the primary, secondary and intermediate colors. The catch is to also show the relationship between the three main complementary color pairs. 

So far I've seen many designs that use triangles and circles, but other that have incorporated monsters, aliens and skulls. Pictures soon I hope!

In addition, students will need to design a related painting that uses, tints, tones, shades and neutralized color of one, two or three hues. 

These exercises are in preparation of a longer term acrylic painting on canvas board (or possibly oil pastel design) using a color scheme of choice. 

I am pretty excited and hope the calming effect and novelty of painting don't wear off any time soon!