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.

Painted Color Wheels

Middle School - Elements of Art: COLOR

After all that practice mixing colors with the Value Scales and Robots, students were ready to create their own color wheel.

We learned about all the colors, their places on the wheel, names of various categories of colors, and practice coloring one with color pencil. Whew! Finally, we were ready to tackle the real color wheel.

Students had to decide on a theme and come up with a variety of drawings to create the wheel. Once drawn, each color had to be assigned to its proper placement.

Value Robots

Middle School - Elements of Art: Value

For this unit we talked a lot about value, meaning going from light to dark or dark to light.
Kids practiced this concept first with pencil, then with 1 color plus black and white, to create the value scale you see below.

The first row is black and white paint mixed to create the various values of grays.
The second row is the color, blue in this case, mixed with white, and the third is blue mixed with black.






Once all those steps were complete, the kids were ready to draw their robots!

Dynamic Masking Tape Sculpture

Middle School - Sculpture

As our last project before the Christmas holiday, I thought it'd be cool to do a 3-D project of some kind. We are finishing up on our Shape & Form Unit, so what better way to explore form than through sculpture?

The key terms for this project are STATIC and DYNAMIC.

I give you: A Dynamic Sculpture!
Some may be more dynamic than others, and they're ALL nonetheless amazing.

This was so much fun to do, and ho what a mess! And so worth it!!! I'm sure you'll agree as you go through the result below.