ART & SCIENCE: Color Mixing teaching notes

ART & SCIENCE
Introduction to Color Cycles
Using TEMPERA PAINTS with Young Students

This is a sample overview. Students should have a minimum of 5 sessions to be comfortable with painting. Day One: making geometric/organic shapes, using only two colors to see how many hues and tones you can get. Day Two: using three colors create overlapping layers (landscapes)l Day Three: a follow up on landscapes. Day Four could be partner painting using really big paper (18 x 22”). Day Five: portfolio & closure.

OBJECTIVE: To incorporate science and art. Choose a theme from the science standards: the elements (air, earth, fire, water), an environment (land, sea, sky), cycles (weather, day/night, seasons, etc.) Prepare by studying science lesson/ concept you wish to enhance with art. Create art using thumbnail drawings, tempera paints, and afterwards, have a complimenting session. Then brainstorm to show what concepts students have learned. This project spans about 2-3 one+ hour sessions.

PRE-PLANNING:: DAY TWO: Each student will create thumbnail drawings: For each student have white paper, pencil, or water-base black felt tip pens; and items to draw. They could be from magazine & calendar pictures of animals, plants, ecosystems, landscapes, etc.

I like to begin DAY ONE & TWO with landscapes composed of layers or organic triangles. I demonstrate nature’s dendritic triangles with calendar photos of landscapes: we count layers and look for triangles. Have students individually come up with drawing/painting ideas, using contour or solid (not sketchy) line (this could develop into another lesson on biological illustration).

Drawings of students late 1990s mid-2000s

Three drawings, Scotland, ca 2006

Loch Tummel

 

Loch reflection

Argyle Butte

I have no idea when these drawings were done, they were from old calendar photos, I've a vague memory of drawing them after I had returned from Scotland. But I could've drawn them much earlier. The scan date is 6/2006. I was teaching at Cleveland Elementary School in Oakland, and had to come up with lot of drawing ideas. This morphed into a pastel, and a painting exercise based on layers.

O Brave New World

Here we are, one month into the new year and Diana asks, Is time speeding up for you? Neil has always lived in the fast track of time, so it’s a rhetorical question at best. But new year, new world. Maybe our perception of time began to speed up when the continents opened, or were garroted, in most cases. A mere handful of Spaniards on that island. Jade beads and gold littered in their eyes, and all was lost. Arawak and Carrib Indians in their feathered cloaks kept their eyes on the birds of the sky while the Spaniards plundered the earth and sent all that New World cargo to resurrect the empty coffers of the Old World. Always broke. They broke continents. How anthropocentric. We referred to western civilization when we mean European civilization, not Chinese, not Mayan, or Arawak. A New Guinea islander once asked Jared Diamond: How come you white people got all the cargo and we got none? What’s wi' dat? It boils down to a slender golden shaft of wheat and the sheep grazing those hillsides before a thousand years of drought turned the land to a scriptural parchment of land and oil. Of all the animals of the world, only a handful or domesticatble and nearly all are from the Fertile Crescent which led to overabundant grain harvests and tillage, separating us from our brothers. It was an unequal harvest, an unequal advantage, creating unequal worlds. O brave new world that has such creatures in it. Caliban in his feathered cloak raising a human thighbone from that distant shore, gnashing his teeth on the rising sun, time speeding up.

1/27/2006 Writers' Group