Mini Monets

Greetings Parents!

The first project during the Colors and Values session is to create a color wheel. The color wheel is the basis for learning about colors. A simple color wheel illustrates the primary and secondary colors. The primary colors are the first colors introduced because they are used to create almost every other color. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. When two primary colors are mixed together, a secondary color is made. The secondary colors are purple, green, and orange. To introduce colors and color mixing to the artists, I read White Rabbits’ Color Bookby Alan Baker.

To start off our color wheel, we drew a large circle/ round shape on our paper. Next we had to divide it into 6 sections, making something similar to a pie chart. After each line we drew, we counted how many parts, or slices, we made in our color wheels. During the first class, we created a crayon guide. We went in the order of a Rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple) coloring each pie slice in the correct order.

To kick off the second class, we watched a Sesame Street stop motion video about the 3 primary colors and the 3 secondary colors that are made from mixing the primary colors. Then, the artists started painting the primary colors on top of the crayon guides we made the class before. Once those were painted, we began to mix our own secondary colors and paint on the crayon secondary color parts. A Color Wheel alternates primary and secondary colors. It’s helpful to know that a secondary color is located between the two primaries that make it. Orange is between red and yellow, green is between yellow and blue, and purple is between red and blue. By mixing their own colors, the artists could see that there can be many different hues of purple, green, and orange. Once we finished our colors wheels, it was up to each artist for how or if they wanted to paint the background. Many wanted to mix all the colors together to discover the black/brown/grey color they make. We will use the color wheel over the next few projects to talk about how color groups will influence our projects.

The objective of this project is to identify connections between art and concepts from other disciplines, such as math (division of circle into 6 parts), science (color mixing), and language arts. Our next project will be a self-portrait from viewing the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo.