Muted Color Relief Sculpture

Last week, my students helped to create boxy, relief sculpture using saturated colors. This week they helped make a relief sculpture using curvy shapes and muted colors.

A color can only be as bright as it is when you buy it in the bottle. You can however make the color more dull by essentially contaminating it. There are two ways to mute a color: by adding gray or by adding its opposite color and the color wheel (its complement). If you want to make a bright orange into a rust color, add a little blue. A bright yellow can become a brown mustard with a little purple mixed in. 

Every student chose a color to mute and then paint on curved cardboard shapes. I didn't limit them to part of the palette like last week when it was just pink or colors with lots of yellow. The fact that all the colors are moving towards grays and browns means they have the intensity in common, and that's enough to look good tother. 

Analogous Painted Box Tactile Sculpture

 

What can you do with an old coffee table top and a bunch of tiny boxes handed to you in a garbage bag? Make a relief sculpture for a color theory lesson of course!

For this project, students painted the boxes on one side of the color wheel, ranging from pink to green. Students mixed yellow with the pink and yellow with some blue so that most of the colors were warm and cheerful.

Students needed vision to mix the colors but didn't need any vision to feel whether or not their box was covered with paint. We all worked together to finish 135 boxes in 9 rows of 15. The coffee table had a light spray paint coverage with blacks so that some of the old scratches were covered.

Then we used masking tape to make rows and light up the squares.

It was nothing short of a miracle that the width of the tape on each age, and a tape widths between each row and column worked out to fill the space exactly.  It was a real win for the power of eye-balling and guess work. We were just guessing how many boxes we'd need. It took two people to light up the ends of the tape on either side of a box. We didn't use rulers to measure, just the width of a box.

I glued the bottoms down with hot glue and now we have a tactile sculpture that we can use to discuss things like: rectilinear shapes, crystalographic balance, analogous color schemes, and high intensity. 

Adjusting Color and Learning about Color Science.

Students practice finding the right hue, saturation, and value to get match a target color on the smart board

It's been fun helping students understand the science of color. There are so many great videos and podcasts about it. We talk about refracted light, how cones in our eyes receive color, how color can evoke emotions, the history and use of symbolic colors in art, why some of them are color blind...it's all fascinating.

My students responded well to the Science of Color videos and activities on Kahn academy. The color scientist from Pixar explains concepts in an easy to understand way, and shows how color was applied to certain scenes in movies to create a mood and communicate a message.

Students got a chance to try to create and match colors, and edit colors from movie stills to create more contrast or greater harmony. Below is an example of how I adjusted color in a watercolor to make it more coherent. It's important for my students to learn that they can adjust what they've put on paper or in a digital piece of artwork to make things better.

When color range is too wide, it looks chaotic

Adding blue to the yellows makes the composition analogous.

the dark background make the colors look like they're glowing

 

Triadic Color Scheme Compositions

There are three basic classifications of color: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The primary colors are three equally spaced on the color wheel. The Secondary are also equally spaced color wheel and anytime you use three equally spaced colors on the color wheel you get a TRIADIC COLOR SCHEME. 

For this quick project, students put pen to paper and use a line to create either curvilinear or rectilinear shapes. They could go back in and add some overlapping shapes. Then they picked either the primary colors or the secondary colors to make a triadic color study.

I expect my students who are blind to know the names of the primary and secondary colors and to draw their compositions, choosing what kind of shapes they want to make. I traced these drawings in hot glue so they could paint within the tactile perimeters for each color.

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.

Complementary Color Op Art Assignment

Once you have a color wheel made, you can begin to discuss the relationships and positions of colors on the wheel to form color harmonies. A complementary color scheme consists of two colors that are opposite on the color wheel. They have nothing in common, but that's OK-opposites attract! The contrast in these combos pop in a way that make them perfect for sports teams like the Florida Gators or New Orleans Saints.

yellow-orange/blue-purple compliments

I teach complements by setting three bottles primary colored paint on a table: red, yellow, and blue. These are the first and most essential colors that you need to make all of the other colors (secondary, tertiary and beyond). Two primaries make a secondary. I ask, "What do yellow and blue make?" "Green!" they answer. "And what is left over?" "Red." ":What is the opposite of green?" "Red!"  A primary color's complement is the secondary color that is a combination of the remaining primaries. So in a pair of complementary colors, you get all three primaries. The root of the word complement means "to complete." I continue to hold up a primary colored bottle of paint while students look at the remaining two colors to figure the secondary color that would make up the opposite until the concept is solidified.

Students can also look at their color wheel to find compliments other than the primaries and secondary three combos: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. These tertiary colors are just shifted slightly to be a yellow-orange and blue-purple. or a blue-green and a red-orange.  When naming the tertiary colors the primary color always comes first and secondary color second. The name is the recipe for mixing. You would never have an orange-yellow, because orange can't describe a yellow. yellow is yellow. Once you mix in a little orange it is no longer yellow, it is orange.

Some students chose to work markers. Scented markers can be useful for my students who are blind. Others worked in colored pencil. Some were able to shade and highlight their shapes to make the optical illusion a little more effective. 

I outlined in hot glue the Wiki Stix drawings of students who are totally blind. Then I placed tiny pieces of Wiki Stix in every other space to make a checker board. The students could color each space without the tactile "dot" in one color, then use the complementary color to color each space with a dot, one by one, removing the dots along the way.  Student with very little vision used a VisioBook magnifier to zoom in on his shapes, which were also outlined in hot glue. It had been a dozen years since I assigned this color project, but I think the students were pretty pleased with their final pieces.

 

Color Wheel Lesson Plan

The color wheel is the foundation of color theory, but creating a color wheel mandala teaches so much more than primary, secondary and tertiary colors. They are also learning about social studies: culture and history of rose windows and sand mandalas. Math: division and angles. Science: how rainbows are made through refracted light and the psychology of how certain colors can evoke emotions. Art: radial balance, repetition, value, unity, and color harmonies. Careers: interior and fashion design, graphic design, photography, floral design, landscaping and wedding planning all require a basic use of how to use color effectively.

In this lesson we watched videos of Buddhist monks making Sand Mandalas with colored sand. Students learned about the concepts of impermanence and change are basic principles of some philosophies, as the monks can sweep away a masterpiece that took a hundred plus man hours to create. There may be some wisdom in not being too attached to things. We also listened to an hour long Radiolab podcast on the science of color, which included musical chords to help us hear the range of most non-color blind people see compared to butterflies or prawn shrimp. We learned about the research of genetically rare tetrachrome people. They discussed how the color blue is not in ancient literature from the Bible to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Egypt being the one exception as they actually had a pigment for blue. Then came the project.

Students cut out 14 inch circles and did the math to figure out that the 12 sections would require 30 degree angles. They folded their circle into fourths and then each fourth into 3rds to get those 30 degree angles. They then used a compass and ruler to make designs. Some used a piece shaped piece of paper to create a design, which they then traced twelve times onto their wheel with the use of a light box. Students charted out where to put their primary colors of red, yellow and blue (with three spaces between each), and their secondary colors of orange, green, and purple. The six tertiary were the ones that were left, and each of their names consisted of the primary and secondary colors they were touching. The name is the recipe: yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple, red-purple, red-orange, yellow-orange.  With a few markings students could keep track of where they wanted their lights and darks to go.

When mixing a color it is best to start with the lighter color and add a tiny bit of dark at a time until you get a mix that is visually even. If you mix equal parts of red (naturally dark color) and yellow (naturally light color) it will be a very red orange and you'll end up wasting gobs of yellow to get a middle orange color. The same works with tinting and shading colors. To make a color lighter, you tint it by adding a little of the color to white. But to make a color darker, you start with the color and shade it by adding a tiny bit of black at a time. Those dark paints are powerful.

By the time the color wheel is created, they've learned how to mix paint properly to create secondary and tertiary colors from the three basic primary colors. They've also learned to tint and shade each color. Once it's completed, real discussions can be had by using the wheel as a reference. What's the complement of red? look directly across the color wheel to find the green. Want to a nice analogous color pallet? point to any four neighboring colors on the wheel. Want to see what a monochromatic color scheme might look like? Look at any little pie piece on your wheel and you'll find darks and lights of the same hue. I feel so strongly about everyone learning their colorwheel, that I teach it to my blind students. 

Braille labels with color initials help students understand upcoming lessons on color harmonies