Mini Monets

Welcome to the next session, Painting Colors and Values! I always start this session by letting the artists mix 2 primary colors to make each of the secondary colors. I started by reading the book Mix it Up by Henri Tullet. It’s by the author of Press Here and it’s an interactive book. He has everything set up so that each page needs to be tapped, smushed, spread, or shaken to show how colors will mix. This book is great if you never actually want to get your fingers messy, but we like to get messy in Mini Monets! To get started, I gave each artist an oil pastel for the 3 primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. They had 3 sheets of paper that were divided in half to draw two primary color circles on. One had red and yellow, one had blue and yellow, and the last had red and blue. I gave them the primary colors in tempera paint. They took the matching color of primary paint to each of the circles they had drawn. This is a great chance to practice one to one correspondence since they were also given one paintbrush for each color. We used an impasto technique of applying thick amounts of paint onto each circle. The more paint, the better the colors would mix once the paper was folded, smashed, and rubbed together. Many artists knew from the book what colors we would get once we added paint to the paper.  The artists made the three secondary colors, orange, purple, and green this way. Blending this way also exposes artists to all the different hue’s of the secondary color by introducing the tertiary colors, red orange, yellow orange, blue green, yellow green, and red violet, blue violet. 

This project took two weeks to complete with different groups reacing different stopping points. To start the beginning of the second class, I showed a stop motion film from Sesame Street about the 3 primary colors and the 3 secondary colors. Then I read the book, Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni, about 2 color friends who join together to make one secondary color, green.

            The objective of this project is to identify tools, media, and processes for creating art.

            Our next project is a self-portrait inspired by the colorful portraits of Henri Matisse.