Analogous Watercolor Assignment

 

For a quick and easy color theory project, I had my students choose three neighboring colors on the color wheel to make an analogous watercolor painting. Students began by using masking/painter's tape to break up the picture plane into small, medium, and large, shapes. I like it when the strips of paint go off the edges of the paper, but smaller pieces can work too, as long as there is overlap of tape.

blind student uses fingers to navigate what parts of the paper still need painted.

blind student adding value to tape edges

Then the students wet their entire piece of paper with by brushing or spraying water on their watercolor paper. Next, they painted one color at one end, and then overlap a second color blending along the way. It could be two secondary, such as a blue at one end and red at another to make a purple in the middle, or they could use a primary in the middle like a blue with a blue-purple on one side and a green-blue on the other. 

That could be the end of the assignment, but I found everyone was able to take their painting to a next level but tracing their tape with a pencil and smudging it with their finger or gradually adding lighter value to fade it out, to create a shadow once the tape was pealed off.

By continuing to peal off one piece of tape at a time and shading around the intersections, a sense of layers and depth is created. For those with vision, they could even activate the background by creating even more layers. This was done by laying the tape done again in different positions and retracing/blending, and pealing off. What could have been a five minute exercise in mixing two or three colors to create a color harmony, now becomes an interesting composition using not only color, but line, shape, and value! That's a lot of ground being covered for a two day project.

Oil Pastel-Glue Pattern Project for the Blind

The concept of balance gets more complicated when you try to balance color and shape throughout a composition. The goal is to lead the viewer's eye throughout the piece, placing blues and oranges in ways the form triangles and take value and shape into account as you create some visual stability.

This is especially complicated when you don't have any vision. My students, who are visually impaired or blind began their assignment by setting a squirt of school glue in motion to create a meandering line that crossed over itself to make shapes. The glue created boundaries for oil pastel, but Elmer's isn't a tall enough wall for some of my students, So I would trace over the Elmer's with Wiki-Stix for my students to feel their shapes. Or they would start their drawings with Wiki-Stix and I'd trace them in hot glue before removing the Wiki Stix.

Wiki Stix create boundaries on one or two shapes at a time.

Students would choose where to place each color and then vary the value within the shape, which made it a more interesting than flat shapes. Oil Pastels are easy to use and after coloring for a short amount of time it is easy to feel the difference between plain paper and the greasy patch of color. I was so pleased with how the assignments turned out, proving that you don't need to know how to draw to make a pretty picture, and you don't need to see to make a solid composition.