2012: Element Project: Color/Value Project (sort of)

Our other project last weekend was more complicated and more involved than many of our more recent creations. I was going for a project that might take a bit of time to complete while my youngest child napped. This project is conducive to talking about some of the Elements of Art: shapes, color, value, space, and line. We created these lovely paintings that I put up on our art room wall:

Top: My 6 year old's, Middle: My 8 year old's, Bottom: Mine :-)

We kind of combined two projects I found. One project inspiration has a similar layout to what we created but was about color value (the light and dark of one color). You can see in the photo above that I tried this project as it was supposed to go with my purple circle picture. But as many projects go, we had to adapt and change as we went along. The other inspiration came from the Art is the Best Part of the Day Blog. In their project, they picked two primary colors and created analogous color images and added white along the way to lighten some of the colors.

Okay, let's start with the first part of the project. Creating a shape and lines.

We used a ruler, pencil, and oil pastel to make a shape in the center, then drew only vertical and horizontal lines to fill in the paper. I experimented with black crayon and pastel and thought the pastel would resist the paint a bit more. So we went with that. I'm sure black crayon would work almost as well and be a cleaner alternative.

My original plan was for us to use one color and just keep adding white to create a color value image. However, this was the first time we used our new Biocolor paints. I experimented with the paint a bit while the girls were busy drawing their shape and lines. I was a little disappointed in how the paint covered the space on the page. It was not nearly as opaque as I was hoping for. And you could really see the brush strokes. Also, when I mixed in the white, I had to mix in a LOT of white to get a significant enough value change to show up on the paper. After discovering all this, I decided it would be better for the girls to pick two colors and mix them to create analogous color paintings instead of value paintings.

Isn't it cute how hard they are concentrating and how thoughtful they are while they are working? :-)

Here are their finished paintings:

Lily picked magenta and yellow. I had her paint 8 spots with each raw color. Then I had her mix those two to get an orangey color. After that, she mixed white with each of the three colors to get a lighter version. Hers worked out pretty well!

Ella picked turquoise and red. But when we mixed the two together, we did not get a purpley color as we thought. We got more of a gray muddled color. So she "cheated" a bit and just used the purple paint to fill hers in. She also added white to the three colors to get different values.

Here is my "value" painting. I added a bit of black to get one shade darker than the raw purple color from the bottle. And then I added white several times to get the lighter shades. I also went over my color blocks 2-3 times with the paint drying in between each time. This gave it a much more opaque finish and didn't look quite as watercolor-y. Although, I was a bit disappointed and frustrated at first (I didn't show this to the girls), we adapted the project and it worked out. Now, we have some nice artwork for the art room wall. Once it was underway, this was a fun project.

Sensory Light Table: Paul Klee Shape Activity

We've been having a lot of fun with our new light panel. Not all of the activities we've been doing with it are art or craft related so I'm torn with sharing them here because I don't want to lose the focus of this blog. I may just throw the random activities into one post just so you can see what else we've been up to with the light panel. I've been trying to figure out ways to use it related to art so here's an original idea I came up with. Funny, part of this activity I did find on Pinterest, but I do think what I did with it is unique. I haven't seen this one anywhere else. I got the idea for making shapes out of plastic binder dividers here. The wonderful wooden blocks with translucent colored centers are soooo expensive. This is a great, cheap alternative!

I tried to think about how we could use shapes to make art. I could have just asked my girls to create a picture with the shapes. But I have learned from past experience that it is good to give them a bit more direction. When I leave things completely open-ended they tend to get overwhelmed. So I decided to transform our Paul Klee project from last summer. I showed the girls their Klee pages from their art journals and asked them to create a cityscape with the shapes. My younger daughter wasn't much into this, but it was the time of day when she is usually tired so she was more interested in watching a movie than doing the activity.

However, once again, my 8 year old was completely into this activity! She is so intrigued by the light panel. Almost anything I set up with it (even if it's more for my 2 year old) she jumps right in and is very engaged.

 

The image above is her finished cityscape. She explained to me that the two yellow squares on the posts on the left and right are lamp posts. And that's her origami hamster she made earlier in the morning. She says it was taking a taxi back to its house. :-) I thought that was so great! I asked her if she could make one more building where the hamster was so it would look even more like Klee's art. And I showed her how we could layer the smaller shapes to make even more shapes. And she came up with this:

In my completely biased opinion, I think that is a pretty darn good light panel rendition of Paul Klee's Castle and Sun! 

She asked if she could just play with the shapes for a bit when she was done with her Klee image. I told her to go for it. And she came up with this:

 

LOL! It's a home for her hamster! In the picture the hamster is in its "ball". The left part with the yellow circle is the hamster's wheel. And the rest of it is its maze/home.

She called her sister in to show her how the hamster could "go through" the maze.

 

So creative, cute and fun! I am so over the top thrilled that we have a light panel. It is so great to see how creative the kids get with it. And it's fun and challenging for me to see what I can come up with for them to do with the panel in an artistic way.