I think my favorite element of art is Color. This is hard for my students to believe as they often ask me why I always wear black. First, it goes with everything….EASY, and second, when you are talking about pigment, it is the presence of all colors. Weird right? Because in light, black is the absence of all color. So after we sorted this oddity out, students explored color in fun, age appropriate projects.
First and Second graders experimented with the primary colors, red, blue and yellow. These are the colors that cannot be made by mixing any other colors. When primary colors are mixed together, they create secondary colors. Students mixed red and blue to make purple, yellow and red to make orange and yellow and blue to make green. After mixing colors, they created a garden background and used the colors they mixed to create cute "color mixing ladybugs" with primary color wings and secondary color bodies.
 |
| First grader Brayden |
Third and Fourth graders explored the difference between warm and cool colors and learned that each set of colors creates a very different feeling in similar works of art. Looking below, which artwork makes you want to reach for a cool sip of Lemonade while the other will have you reaching for a hat and scarf?
 |
| Fourth grader Aunesty |
 |
| Third grader Emarie' |
Fifth and Sixth graders conducted a value study as they selected one color and added varying degrees of white to tint and then black to shade the color. They used this range of color to create a moonlit sky, to which they added a painted a silhouette of a tree.
 |
| Fifth grader Keionnah |
 |
| Fifth grader Jalen |
Seventh and Eighth grade students used watercolors as they studied analogous colors, which are any three colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel. They selected one set of analogous colors for the sky, one set for the tree background and a final set for the grass. This was a project that took a lot of focus and persistence and the results are beautiful.
 |
| Seventh grader J'Niyah |
 |
| Eighth grader Kenya |
