Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom

High School - Art 1 - Analogous Colors

This is the end point all those value scales were building up to... a reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles.
The catch is that students could only use the 2 Primary colors picked for their Analogous Chart, along with black and white. Any color variations derived from mixing these initial colors were allowed.

Students were provided with a colored print of the original painting (image on right) and a couple "coloring pages" of the same (below).

After drawing the bedroom on a big 9x18 in. paper, and referring to their Analogous Chart, they did one or two practice run of color scheme with color pencils on the coloring page, to have a better idea of how they wanted this to look.

It took 2 weeks to get to this point and another 3 to complete the painting. This was a really good unit, with a nice progression of difficulty and paint mastery. From the look of the final product, I'd say this was time well spent.

Analogous Value Charts

High School - Elements of Art: VALUE & COLOR

This is our third and last value scale - more of a chart, really - and the last step before getting into our main color project (see Monochromatic for the first).

These chart have two purposes:
1. the continuation of our learning to mix colors for a specific desired result;
2. acting a visual reference point for the up-coming painting.

Analogous means colors that follow each other on the color wheel, typically 3 colors, though in this case we created more than three.

Students choose 2 of the 3 primary colors (red, blue, yellow) in addition to black and white paint. I picked two charts for each color pairs to display here, as they are a bit repetitive otherwise.

Monochromatic Value Scale

High School - Art 1 - Elements of Art: COLOR & VALUE

Time to dive into colors! To start on this unit, we first talked about Value and its definition as related to art, referring to the range of lightness and darkness of a color.

For warm-up, students did a gray scale with paint showing 5 different values of gray by mixing black and white paint in the proper proportions.








The 2nd Value scale was a Monochromatic Scale, using only 1 color with black and white.

Chinese New Year Composition

High School - Art 1

For the high school Chinese New Year composition, I provided the students with several pages of Chinese characters, designs, cartoons and other Asian style illustrations.

From these they were to pick and choose and put multiple elements together to create their composition, altering any designs as they please to make it their own.


The final product had to be colored with color pencils.

1 Point Perspective Room

High School - Art 1 - Perspective

After several days of learning and practicing 1 point perspective as a class, the students were ready to be set out on their own. They had to create their own room using the 1 point perspective technique.

The minimum requirements for the assignment were as follows:

• 1 window
• 1 door
• 1 doorway into another area
• 2 pieces of furniture

Vase Faces Reversible Images

High School - Art1 - Elements of Art: Positive/Negative Space

We were studying a concept called "Reversible Figure-Ground Relationship," which is a fancy way of saying Visual Illusion. The idea is that it is hard to tell which part of the image is the "figure" - or "positive" shape/space, i.e. actual object drawn - and which part is the "ground" - or "negative" shape/space, i.e. background.

You've seen these images that flip back and forth when you change your eye focusing while looking at them, like this one for example:

Which do you see? The young woman or the old lady?

American Gothic Halloween Parody

High School - Art I

For the Halloween season, I had the kids do a parody of American Gothic, Halloweens style.

This is the one time during the year where they are allowed to be as gory or disgusting or bloody as they want - surprisingly, most kids chose to be relatively tame, which is actually nice.
They could also pick a different theme if Halloween was not their thing.

We had pictures of the painting American Gothic by Grant Wood, as well as various examples of parodies I found on the net for inspiration.

Optical Illusion

High School - Art I - Elements of Art: LINE

The year started off with a study of the Elements of Art, the first of which is LINE. Once the initial discussion and vocabulary is done, it was time for the main project. This year I went for a colorful Optical Illusion done in color pencils.

An other aspect of this project was to learn to control the intensity of the color pencil, going from light to dark and vice versa.

Requirement were as follows:
- The "ropes" had to appear 3-D with a highlight on top and shadows on the side.
- Color choices had to show some degree of contrast.

First Project Of The Year part 1

High School - Art I

After the customary syllabus and beginning of the year activities, we jumped right into our first project and out into space!

The Mid School went with the default of "Falling Backward Into Space" while the High School were left up to their own choices, in addition to the "Space" option.

I introduced the project by telling a little story, which I relay on the Middle School post.


First, the High School:

On the left, notice Superman flying by in the background, ready for that last minute rescue.